There are certain heartaches for which time brings no healing; nay, which grow but the sorer and fiercer as days and years roll on; of this kind, perhaps, were the stern and bitter feelings which now darkened the face of Marston with an almost perpetual gloom.  His habits became even more unsocial than before.  The society of his son he no longer seemed to enjoy.  Long and solitary rambles in his wild and extensive demesne consumed the listless hours or his waking existence; and when the weather prevented this, he shut himself up, upon pretence of business, in his study.

He had not, since the occasion we have already mentioned, referred to the intended departure of Mademoiselle de Barras.  Truth to say, his feelings with respect to that young lady were of a conflicting and mysterious kind; and as often as his dark thoughts wandered to her (which, indeed, was frequently enough), his muttered exclamation seemed to imply some painful and horrible suspicions respecting her.

“Yes,” he would mutter, “I thought I heard your light foot upon the lobby, on that accursed night.  Fancy!  Well, it may have been, but assuredly a strange fancy.  I cannot comprehend that woman.  She baffles my scrutiny.  I have looked into her face with an eye she might well understand, were it indeed as I sometimes suspect, and she has been calm and unmoved.  I have watched and studied her; still—­doubt, doubt, hideous doubt!—­is she what she seems, or—­a tigress?”

Mrs. Marston, on the other hand, procrastinated from day to day the painful task of announcing to Mademoiselle de Barras the stern message with which she had been charged by her husband.  And thus several weeks had passed, and she began to think that his silence upon the subject, notwithstanding his seeing the young French lady at breakfast every morning, amounted to a kind of tacit intimation that the sentence of banishment was not to be carried into immediate execution, but to be kept suspended over the unconscious offender.

It was now six or eight weeks since the hearse carrying away the remains of the ill-fated Sir Wynston Berkley had driven down the dusky avenue; the autumn was deepening into winter, and as Marston gloomily trod the woods of Gray Forest, the withered leaves whirled drearily along his pathway, and the gusts that swayed the mighty branches above him were rude and ungenial.  It was a bleak and somber day, and as he broke into a long and picturesque vista, deep among the most sequestered woods, he suddenly saw before him, and scarcely twenty paces from the spot on which he stood, an apparition, which for some moments absolutely froze him to the earth.

Travel-soiled, tattered, pale, and wasted, John Merton, the murderer, stood before him.  He did not exhibit the smallest disposition to turn about and make his escape.  On the contrary, he remained perfectly motionless, looking upon his former master with a wild and sorrowful gaze.  Marston twice or thrice essayed to speak; his face was white as death, and had he beheld the specter of the murdered baronet himself, he could not have met the sight with a countenance of ghastlier horror.