After this he lay quiet again for some minutes, exhausted by having spoken so long.  All the factitious strength, which had made him loud and violent in his delirium, was gone; he seemed as weak as a sick child.

“Where is she?” he asked at last; “why doesn’t she come to me?  You have not answered that question.”

“I have told you that her place is not here,” Gilbert replied evasively.  “You have no right to expect her here, never having given her the right to come.”

“No; it is my own fault.  She is in Hampshire still, I suppose.  Poor girl, I would give the world to see her dear face looking down at me.  I must get well and go back to her.  When shall I be strong enough to travel?—­to-morrow, or if not to-morrow, the next day; surely the next day—­eh, Gilbert?”

He raised himself in the bed in order to read the answer in Gilbert’s face, but fell back upon the pillows instantly, exhausted by the effort.  Memory had only returned to him in part.  It was clear that he had forgotten the fact of Marian’s disappearance,—­a fact of which he had seemed half-conscious long ago in his delirium.

“How did you find out that Marian was my wife?” he asked presently, with perfect calmness.  “Who betrayed my secret?”

“Your own lips, in your delirious talk of her, which has been incessant; and if collateral evidence were needed to confirm your words, this, which I found the other day marking a place in your Shakespeare.”

Gilbert took a scrap of ribbon from his breast, a ribbon with a blue ground and a rosebud on it,—­a ribbon which he had chosen himself for Marian, in the brief happy days of their engagement.

John Saltram contemplated the scrap of colour with a smile that was half sombre, half ironical.

“Yes, it was hers,” he said; “she wore it round that slim swan’s throat of hers; and one morning, when I was leaving her in a particularly weak frame of mind, I took it from her neck and brought it away in my bosom, for the sake of having something about me that she had worn; and then I put it in the book, you see, and forgot all about it.  A fitting emblem of my love—­full of passion and fervour to-day, at the point of death to-morrow.  There have been times when I would have given the world to undo what I had done, when my life seemed blighted by this foolish marriage; and again, happier moments, when my wife was all the universe to me, and I had not a thought or a dream beyond her.  God bless her!  You will let me go to her, Gilbert, the instant I am able to travel, as soon as I can drag myself anyhow from this bed to the railway?  You will not stand between me and my love?”

“No, John Saltram; God knows, I have never thought of that.”

“And you knew I was a traitor—­you knew it was my work that had destroyed your scheme of happiness—­and yet have been beside me, watching me patiently through this wretched illness?”

“That was a small thing to do You did as much, and a great deal more, for me, when I was ill in Egypt.  It was a mere act of duty.”