Yes, the picture which arose before him as Ellen Carley spoke was the picture of John Saltram.  The description seemed in every particular to apply to the face and figure of his one chosen friend.  But then all such verbal pictures are at best vague and shadowy, and Gilbert knew that he carried that one image in his mind, and would be apt unconsciously to twist the girl’s words into that one shape.  He asked if any picture or photograph of Mr. Holbrook had been left at the Grange, and Ellen Carley told him no, she had never even seen a portrait of Marian’s husband.

He was therefore fain to be content with the description which seemed so exactly to fit the friend he loved, the friend to whom he had clung with a deeper, stronger feeling since this miserable suspicion had taken root in his mind.

“I think I could have forgiven him if he had come between us in a bold and open way,” he said to himself, brooding over this harassing doubt of his friend; “yes, I think I could have forgiven him, in spite of the bitterness of losing her.  But to steal her from me with cowardly treacherous secrecy, to hide my treasure in an obscure corner, and then grow weary of her, and blight her fair young life with his coldness,—­can I forgive him these things? can all the memory of the past plead with me for him when I think of these things?  O God, grant that I am mistaken; that it is some other man who has done this, and not John Saltram; not the man I have loved and honoured for fifteen years of my life!”

But his suspicions were not to be put away, not to be driven out of his mind, let him argue against them as he might.  He resolved, therefore, that as soon as he should have made every effort and taken every possible means towards the recovery of the missing girl, he would make it his business next to bring this thing home to John Saltram, or acquit him for ever.

It is needless to dwell upon that weary work, which seemed destined to result in nothing but disappointment.  The local constabulary and the London police alike exerted all their powers to obtain some trace of Marian Holbrook’s lost footsteps; but no clue to the painful mystery was to be found.  From the moment when she vanished from the eyes of the servant-woman watching her departure from the Grange gate, she seemed to have disappeared altogether from the sight of mankind.  If by some witchcraft she had melted into the dim autumnal mist that hung about the river-bank, she could not have left less trace, or vanished more mysteriously than she had done.  The local constabulary gave in very soon, in spite of Gilbert Fenton’s handsome payment in the present, and noble promises of reward in the future.  The local constabulary were honest and uninventive.  They shook their heads gloomily, and said “Drownded.”

“But the river has been dragged,” Gilbert cried eagerly, “and there has been nothing found.”

He shuddered at the thought of that which might have been hauled to shore in the foul weedy net.  The face he loved, changed, disfigured, awful—­the damp clinging hair.