He thought he saw plain signs that the
family spirit was at last coming back again.
"Well," he said, as he lit her bedroom candle for her, "when we all meet
on the Parade tomorrow, we shall see, as our nautical friends say, how
the land lies. One thing I can tell you, my dear girl--I have used my
eyes to very little purpose if there is not a storm brewing tonight in
Mr. Noel Vanstone's domestic atmosphere."
The captain's habitual penetration had not misled him. As soon as the
door of Sea-view Cottage was closed on the parting guests, Mrs. Lecount
made an effort to assert the authority which Magdalen's influence was
threatening already.
She employed every artifice of which she was mistress to ascertain
Magdalen's true position in Noel Vanstone's estimation. She tried again
and again to lure him into an unconscious confession of the pleasure
which he felt already in the society of the beautiful Miss Bygrave; she
twined herself in and out of every weakness in his character, as the
frogs and efts twined themselves in and out of the rock-work of her
Aquarium. But she made one serious mistake which very clever people
in their intercourse with their intellectual inferiors are almost
universally apt to commit--she trusted implicitly to the folly of a
fool.
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