Marian’s disappearance had taken a darker colour in his mind since that time.  Granted that she had left the Grange of her own accord, having some special reason for leaving secretly, at whose bidding would she have so acted except her husband’s—­she who stood so utterly alone, without a friend in the world?  But what possible motive could Mr. Holbrook have had for such an underhand course—­for making a conspiracy and a mystery out of so simple a fact as the removal of his wife from a place whence he was free to remove her at any moment?  Fair and honest motive for such a course there could be none.  Was it possible, looking at the business from a darker point of view, to imagine any guilty reason for the carrying out of such a plot?  If this man had wanted to bring about a life-long severance between himself and his wife, to put her away somewhere, to keep her hidden from the eyes of the world—­in plainer words, to get rid of her—­might not this pretence of losing her, this affectation of distress at her loss, be a safe way of accomplishing his purpose?  Who else was interested in doing her any wrong?  Who else could have had sufficient power over her to beguile her away from her home?

Pondering on these questions throughout all that weary journey across a wintry landscape of bare brown fields and leafless trees, Gilbert Fenton travelled London-wards, to the city which was so little of a home for him, but in which his life had seemed pleasant enough in its own commonplace fashion until that fatal summer evening when he first saw Marian Nowell’s radiant face in the quiet church at Lidford.

He scarcely stopped to eat or drink at the end of his journey, regaling himself only with a bottle of soda-water, imperceptibly flavoured with cognac by the hands of a ministering angel at the refreshment-counter of the Waterloo Station, and then hurrying on at once in a hansom to that dingy street in Soho where Mr. Medler sat in his parlour, like the proverbial spider waiting for the advent of some too-confiding fly.

The lawyer was at home, and seemed in no way surprised to see Mr. Fenton.

“I have come to you about a bad business, Mr. Medler,” Gilbert began, seating himself opposite the shabby-looking office-table, with its covering of dusty faded baize, upon which there seemed to be always precisely the same array of papers in little bundles tied with red tape; “but first let me ask you a question:  Have you heard from Mrs. Holbrook?”

“Not a line.”

“And have you taken no further steps, no other means of communicating with her?” Gilbert asked.

“Not yet.  I think of sending my clerk down to Hampshire, or of going down myself perhaps, in a day or two, if my business engagements will permit me.”

“Do you not consider the case rather an urgent one, Mr. Medler?  I should have supposed that your curiosity would have been aroused by the absence of any reply to your letters—­that you would have looked at the business in a more serious light than you appear to have done—­that you would have taken alarm, in short.”