Sitting in the dreary silence of that sick chamber, a silence broken only by the painful sound of the sleeper’s difficult breathing, many things came back to his mind; circumstances trivial enough in themselves, but invested with a grave significance when contemplated by the light of today’s revelation.

He remembered those happy autumn afternoons at Lidford; those long, drowsy, idle days in which John Saltram had given himself up so entirely to the pleasure of the moment, with surely something more than mere sympathy with his friend’s happiness.  He remembered that last long evening at the cottage, when this man had been at his best, full of life and gaiety; and then that sudden departure, which had puzzled him so much at the time, and yet had seemed no surprise to Marian.  It had been the result of some suddenly-formed resolution perhaps, Gilbert thought.

“Poor wretch! he may have tried to be true to me,” he said to himself, with a sharp bitter pain at his heart.

He had loved this man so well, that even now, knowing himself to have been betrayed, there was a strange mingling of pity and anger in his mind, and mixed with these a touch of contempt.  He had believed in John Saltram; had fancied him nobler and grander than himself, somehow; a man who, under a careless half-scornful pretence of being worse than his fellows, concealed a nature that was far above the common herd; and yet this man had proved the merest caitiff, a weak cowardly villain.

“To take my hand in friendship, knowing what he had done, and how my life was broken! to pretend sympathy; to play out the miserable farce to the very last!  Great heaven! that the man I have honoured could be capable of so much baseness!”

The sleeper moved restlessly, the eyes were opened once more and turned upon Gilbert, not with the same utter blankness as before, but without the faintest recognition.  The sick man saw some one watching him, and the figure was associated with an unreal presence, the phantom of his brain, which had been with him often in the day and night.

“The man again!” he muttered.  “When will she come?” And then raising himself upon his elbow, he cried imploringly, “Mother, you fetch her!”

He was speaking to his mother, whom he had loved very dearly—­his mother who had been dead fifteen years.

Gilbert’s mind went back to that far-away time in Egypt, when he had lain like this, helpless and unconscious, and this man had nursed and watched him with unwearying tenderness.

“I will see him safely through this,” he said to himself, “and then——­”

And then the account between them must be squared somehow.  Gilbert Fenton had no thought of any direful vengeance.  He belonged to an age in which injuries are taken very quietly, unless they are wrongs which the law can redress—­wounds which can be healed by a golden plaster in the way of damages.

He could not kill his friend; the age of duelling was past, and he not romantic enough to be guilty of such an anachronism as mortal combat.  Yet nothing less than a duel to the death could avenge such a wrong.