Softly approaching
this door, the captain lifted the white muslin curtain which hung over
the window, and looked into the inner room.
There was Mrs. Wragge, with her cap on one side, and her shoes down at
heel; with a row of pins between her teeth; with the Oriental Cashmere
Robe slowly slipping off the table; with her scissors suspended
uncertain in one hand, and her written directions for dressmaking held
doubtfully in the other--so absorbed over the invincible difficulties
of her employment as to be perfectly unconscious that she was at that
moment the object of her husband's superintending eye. Under other
circumstances she would have been soon brought to a sense of her
situation by the sound of his voice. But Captain Wragge was too anxious
about Magdalen to waste any time on his wife, after satisfying himself
that she was safe in her seclusion, and that she might be trusted to
remain there.
He left the parlor, and, after a little hesitation in the passage, stole
upstairs and listened anxiously outside Magdalen's door. A dull sound
of sobbing--a sound stifled in her handkerchief, or stifled in the
bed-clothes--was all that caught his ear.
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