“All this might be, and yet the man be innocent.”

“He might be—­yes, sir.  It is a hard thing, perhaps, even to think him guilty for a moment.  But it is so difficult to account in any common way for Mrs. Holbrook’s disappearance.  If there had been murder done” (the girl shuddered as she said the words)—­“a common murder, such as one hears of in lonely country places—­surely it must have come to light before this, after the search that has been made all round about.  But it would have been easy enough for Mr. Holbrook to decoy his wife away to London or anywhere else.  She would have gone anywhere with him, at a moment’s notice.  She obeyed him implicitly in everything.”

“But why should he have taken her away from this place in a secret manner?” asked Gilbert; “he was free to remove her openly.  And then you describe him as taking an amount of trouble in his search for her, which might have been so easily avoided, had he acted with ordinary prudence and caution.  Say that he wanted to keep the secret of his marriage from the world in which he lives, and to place his wife in even a more secluded spot than this—­which scarcely seems possible—­what could have been easier for him than to take her away when and where he pleased?  No one here would have had any right to question his actions.”

Ellen Carley shook her head doubtfully.

“I don’t know, sir,” she answered slowly; “I daresay my fancies are very foolish; they may have come, perhaps, out of thinking about this so much, till my brain has got addled, as one may say.  But it flashed upon me all of a sudden one night, as Mr. Holbrook was standing in our parlour talking about his wife—­it flashed upon me that he was in the secret of her disappearance, and that he was only acting with us in his pretence of anxiety and all that; I fancied there was a guilty look in his face, somehow.”

“Did you tell him about his wife’s good fortune—­the money left her by her grandfather?”

“I did, sir; I thought it right to tell him everything I could about my poor dear young lady’s journey to London.  She had told him of that in her letters, it seemed, but not about the money.  She had been keeping that back for the pleasure of telling him with her own lips, and seeing his face light up, she said to me, when he heard the good news.  I asked him about the letter which had come in the morning of the day she disappeared, and whether it was from him; but he said no, he had not written, counting upon being with his wife that evening.  It was only at the last moment he was prevented coming.”

“You have looked for that letter, I suppose?”

“O yes, sir; I searched, and Mr. Holbrook too, in every direction, but the letter wasn’t to be found.  He seemed very vexed about it, very anxious to find it.  We could not but think that Mrs. Holbrook had gone to meet some one that day, and that the letter had something to do with her going out.  I am sure she would not have gone beyond the garden and the meadow for pleasure alone.  She never had been outside the gate without me, except when she went to meet her husband.”