friend of mine, who had lately landed in England, after a long sea-voyage.  I got his address in London—­he was a lodger in this house.  I called on him forthwith, and was stunned by the news of your illness.  Such, in brief, is the history of my existing connection with British Medicine; and so it happens that you see me at the present moment sitting in the present chair, now as ever, yours truly, Horatio Wragge.”  In these terms the captain brought his personal statement to a close.  He looked more and more attentively at Magdalen, the nearer he got to the conclusion.  Was there some latent importance attaching to his last words which did not appear on the face of them?  There was.  His visit to the sick-room had a serious object, and that object he had now approached.

In describing the circumstances under which he had become acquainted with Magdalen’s present position, Captain Wragge had skirted, with his customary dexterity, round the remote boundaries of truth.  Emboldened by the absence of any public scandal in connection with Noel Vanstone’s marriage, or with the event of his death as announced in the newspaper obituary, the captain, roaming the eastern circuit, had ventured back to Aldborough a fortnight since, to establish an agency there for the sale of his wonderful Pill.  No one had recognized him but the landlady of the hotel, who at once insisted on his entering the house and reading Kirke’s letter to her husband.  The same night Captain Wragge was in London, and was closeted with the sailor in the second-floor room at Aaron’s Buildings.

The serious nature of the situation, the indisputable certainty that Kirke must fail in tracing Magdalen’s friends unless he first knew who she really was, had decided the captain on disclosing part, at least, of the truth.  Declining to enter into any particulars—­for family reasons, which Magdalen might explain on her recovery, if she pleased—­he astounded Kirke by telling him that the friendless woman whom he had rescued, and whom he had only known up to that moment as Miss Bygrave—­was no other than the youngest daughter of Andrew Vanstone.  The disclosure, on Kirke’s side, of his father’s connection with the young officer in Canada, had followed naturally on the revelation of Magdalen’s real name.  Captain Wragge had expressed his surprise, but had made no further remark at the time.  A fortnight later, however, when the patient’s recovery forced the serious difficulty on the doctor of meeting the questions which Magdalen was sure to ask, the captain’s ingenuity had come, as usual, to the rescue.

“You can’t tell her the truth,” he said, “without awakening painful recollections of her stay at Aldborough, into which I am not at liberty to enter.  Don’t acknowledge just yet that Mr. Kirke only knew her as Miss Bygrave of North Shingles when he found her in this house.  Tell her boldly that he knew who she was, and that he felt (what she must feel) that he had a hereditary right to help and protect her as his father’s son.  I am, as I have already told you,” continued the captain, sticking fast to his old assertion, “a distant relative of the Combe-Raven family; and, if there is nobody else at hand to help you through this difficulty, my services are freely at your disposal.”