“Humph!” muttered Sir David meditatively; “I don’t know that I can tell you much about him.  His position is like that of a good many others of my acquaintance—­rather vague and intangible, to use the word you employed just now.  He is not well off; he is a gentleman by birth, with some small means of his own, and he ‘lives, sir, lives.’  That is about all I can say of him—­from a worldly point of view.  With regard to his affection for Miss Nowell, I know that he loved her passionately, devotedly, desperately—­the strongest expression you can supply to describe a man’s folly.  I never saw any fellow so far gone.  Heaven knows, I did my best to argue him out of his fancy—­urged your claim, the girl’s poverty, every reason against the marriage; but friendly argumentation of that kind goes very little way in such a case.  He took his own course.  It was only when I found the business was decided upon, that I offered him my house in Hampshire; a place to which I never go myself, but which brings me in a decent income in the hands of a clever bailiff.  I knew that Holbrook had no home ready for his wife, and I thought it would give them a pleasant retreat enough for a few months, while the honey and rose-leaves still sweetened the wine-cup of their wedded life.  They have stayed there ever since, as you seem to know; so I conclude they have found the place agreeable.  Confoundedly dreary, I should fancy it myself; but then I’m not a newly married man.”

The Baronet gave a brief sigh, and his thoughts went back for a moment to the time when he too was in Arcadia; when a fair young wife was by his side, and when no hour of his existence seemed ever dull or weary to him.  It was all changed now!  He had billiards and whist, and horses and hounds, and a vast collection of gunnery, and great stores of wine in the gloomy arched vaults beneath the house, where a hundred prisoners had been kept under lock and key when Heatherly had fallen into the hands of the Cromwellian soldiery, and the faithful retainers of the household were fain to lay down their arms.  He had all things that make up the common pleasures and delights of a man’s existence; but he had lost the love which had given these things a new charm, and without which all life seemed to him flat, stale, and unprofitable.  He could sympathise with Gilbert Fenton much more keenly than that gentleman would have supposed possible; for a man suffering from this kind of affliction is apt to imagine that he has a copyright in that species of grief, and that no other man ever did or ever can experience a like calamity.  The same manner of trouble may come to others, of course, but not with a similar intensity.  Others will suffer and recover, and find a balm elsewhere.  He alone is constant until death!

“And you can tell me nothing more about Mr. Holbrook?” he asked after a pause.