She looked at him with a puzzled air.  She had never heard him talk of his relations, had indeed supposed that he stood almost alone in the world; but there was no reason that it should be so, except his silence on the subject.  She watched him for some moments in silence, as he stood leaning against the opposite angle of the chimney-piece waiting for her to speak.  He was looking very ill, much changed since she had seen him last, haggard and worn, with the air of a man who had not slept properly for many nights.  There was an absent far-away look in his eyes:  and Adela Branston felt all at once that her presence was nothing to him; that this desperate step which she had taken had no more effect upon him than the commonest event of every-day life; in a word, that he did not love her.  A cold deathlike feeling came over her as she thought this.  She had set her heart upon this man’s love, and had indeed some justification for supposing that it was hers.  It seemed to her that life was useless—­worse than useless, odious and unendurable—­without it.

But even while she was thinking this, with a cold blank misery in her heart, she had to invent some excuse for this unseemly visit.

“I have waited so anxiously for you to call,” she said at last, in a nervous hesitating way, “and I began to fear that you must be ill, and I wished to consult you about the management of my affairs.  My lawyers worry me so with questions which I don’t know how to answer, and I have so few friends in the world whom I can trust except you; so at last I screwed up my courage to call upon you.”

“I am deeply honoured by your confidence, Mrs. Branston,” John Saltram answered, looking at her gravely with those weary haggard eyes, with the air of a man who brings his thoughts back to common life from some far-away region with an effort.  “If my advice or assistance can be of any use to you, they are completely at your service.  What is this business about which your solicitor bothers you?”

“I’ll explain that to you directly,” Adela answered, taking some letters from her pocket-book.  “How good you are!  I knew that you would help me; but tell me first why you have never been to Cavendish-square in all this long time.  I fear I was right; you have been ill, have you not?”

“Not exactly ill, but very much worried and overworked.”

A light dawned on Adela Branston’s troubled mind.  She began to think that Mr. Saltram’s strange absent manner, his apparent indifference to her presence, might arise from preoccupation, caused by those pecuniary difficulties from which the Pallinsons declared him so constant a sufferer.  Yes, she told herself, it was trouble of this kind that oppressed him, that had banished him from her all this time.  He was too generous to repair his shattered fortunes by means of her money; he was too proud to confess his fallen state.

A tender pity took possession of her.  All that was most sentimental in her nature was awakened by the idea of John Saltram’s generosity.  What was the use of her fortune, if she could not employ it for the relief of the man she loved?