“I do indeed sympathise with you; but it seems so hard that you will not consent to make some use of all that money which is lying idle.  It would make me so happy if I could think it were useful to you; but I dare not say any more.  I have said too much already, perhaps; only I hope you will not think very badly of me for having acted on impulse in this way.”

“Think badly of you, my dear kind soul!  What can I think, except that you are one of the most generous of women?”

“And about these other troubles, Mr. Saltram, which have no relation to money matters; you will not give me your confidence?”

“There is nothing that I can confide in you, Mrs. Branston.  Others are involved in the matter of which I spoke, I am not free to talk about it.”

Poor Adela felt herself repulsed at every point.  It seemed very hard.  Had she been mistaken about this man all the time? mistaken and deluded in those old happy days during her husband’s lifetime, when he had been so constant a visitor at the river-side villa, and had seemed exactly what a man might seem who cherished a tenderness which he dared not reveal in the present, but which in a brighter future might blossom into the full-blown flower of love?

“And now about your own affairs, my dear Mrs. Branston?” John Saltram said with a forced cheerfulness, drawing his chain up to the table and assuming a business-like manner.  “These tiresome letters of your lawyers’; let me see what use I can be in the matter.”

Adela Branston produced the letters with rather an absent air.  They were letters about very insignificant affairs; the renewal of a lease or two; the reinvestment of a sum of money that had been lent on mortgage, and had fallen in lately; transactions that scarcely called for the employment of Mr. Saltram’s intellectual powers.  But he gave them very serious attention nevertheless, well aware, all the time that this business consultation was only the widow’s excuse for her visit; and while she seemed to be listening to his advice, her eyes were wandering round the room all the time, noting the dust and confusion, the soda-water bottles huddled in one corner, the pile of books heaped in a careless mass in another, the half-empty brandy-bottle between a couple of stone ink-jars on the mantelpiece.  She was thinking what a dreary place it was, and that there was the stamp of decay and ruin somehow upon the man who occupied it.  And she loved him so well, and would have given all the world to have redeemed his life.

It is doubtful whether Adela Branston heard one syllable of that counsel which Mr. Saltram administered so gravely.  Her mind was full of the failure of this desperate step which she had taken.  He seemed farther from her now than before they had met, obstinately adverse to profit by her friendship, cold and cruel.

“You will come and dine with us very soon, I hope,” she said as she rose to go, “My cousin, Mrs. Pallinson, will be home in a day or two.  She has been nursing her son for the last few days; but he is much better, and I expect her back immediately.  We shall be so pleased to see you; you will name an early day, won’t you?  Monday shall we say, or Sunday?  You can’t plead business on Sunday.”