The girl said this with an air of conviction that sent a deadly chill to Gilbert Fenton’s heart.  It seemed to him in this moment of supreme anguish as if all his trouble of the past, all his vague fears and anxieties about the woman he loved, had been the foreshadowing of this evil to come.  He had a blank helpless feeling, a dismal sense of his own weakness, which for the moment mastered him.  Against any ordinary calamity he would have held himself bravely enough, with the natural strength of an ardent hopeful character; but against this mysterious catastrophe courage and manhood could avail nothing.  She was gone, the fragile helpless creature he had pledged himself to protect; gone from all who knew her, leaving not the faintest clue to her fate.  Could he doubt that this energetic warm-hearted girl was right, and that some foul deed had been done, of which Marian Holbrook was the victim?

“If she lives, I will find her,” he said at last, after a long pause, in which he had sat in gloomy silence, with his eyes fixed upon the ground, meditating the circumstances of Marian’s disappearance.  “Living or dead, I will find her.  It shall be the business of my life from this hour.  All my serious thoughts have been of her from the moment in which I first knew her.  They will be doubly hers henceforward.”

“How good and true you are!” Ellen Carley exclaimed admiringly; “and how you must have loved her!  I guessed when you were here last that it was you to whom she was engaged before her marriage, and told her as much; but she would not acknowledge that I was right.  O, how I wish she had kept faith with you! how much happier she might have been as your wife!”

“People have different notions of happiness, you see, Miss Carley,” Gilbert answered with a bitter smile.  “Yes, you were right; it was I who was to have been Marian Nowell’s husband, whose every hope of the future was bound up in her.  But all that is past; whatever bitterness I felt against her at first—­and I do not think I was ever very bitter—­has passed away.  I am nothing now but her friend, her steadfast and constant friend.”

“Thank heaven that she has such a friend,” Ellen said earnestly.  “And you will make it your business to look for her, sir?”

“The chief object of my life, from this hour.”

“And you will try to discover whether her husband is really true, or whether the search that he has made for her has been a blind to hide his own guilt?”

“What grounds have you for supposing his guilt possible?” asked Gilbert.  “There are crimes too detestable for credibility; and this would be such a one.  You may imagine that I have no friendly feeling towards this man, yet I cannot for an instant conceive him capable of harming a hair of his wife’s head.”

“Because you have not brooded upon this business as I have, sir, for hours and hours together, until the smallest things seem to have an awful meaning.  I have thought of every word and every look of Mr. Holbrook’s in the past, and all my thoughts have pointed one way.  I believe that he was tired of his sweet young wife; that his marriage was a burden and a trouble to him somehow; that it had arisen out of an impulse that had passed away.”