“Perhaps so.  Well, Gilbert, there is no more to be said.  I loved her, selfishly, after the manner of mankind.  I could not bring myself to give her up, and pursued her with a passionate persistence which must plead her excuse.  If her uncle had lived, I doubt whether I should ever have succeeded.  But his death left the tender womanly heart weakened by sorrow; and so I won her, the dearest, truest wife that ever man was blest withal.  Yet, I confess to you, so wayward is my nature, that there have been moments in which I repented my triumph—­weak hours of doubt and foreboding, in which I fear that dear girl divined my thoughts.  Since our wretched separation I have fancied sometimes that a conviction of this kind on her part is at the root of the business, that she has alienated herself from me, believing—­in plain words—­that I was tired of her.”

“Such an idea as that would scarcely agree with Ellen Carley’s account of Marian’s state of mind during that last day or two at the Grange.  She was eagerly expecting your return, looking forward with delight to the pleasant surprise you were to experience when you heard of Jacob Nowell’s will.”

“Yes, the girl told me that.  Great heavens, why did I not return a few days earlier!  I was waiting for money, not caring to go back empty-handed; writing and working like a nigger.  I dared not meet my poor girl at her grandfather’s, since in so doing I must risk an encounter with you.”

After this they talked of Marian’s disappearance for some time, going over the same ground very often in their helplessness, and able, at last, to arrive at no satisfactory conclusion.  If she were with her father, she was with a bad, unscrupulous man.  That was a fact which Gilbert Fenton no longer pretended to deny.  They sat talking till late, and parted for the night in very different spirits.

Gilbert had a good deal of hard work in the City on the following day; a batch of foreign correspondence too important to be entrusted to a clerk, and two or three rather particular interviews.  All this occupied him up to so late an hour, that he was obliged to sleep in London that night, and to defer his return to Hampton till the next day’s business was over.  This time he got over his work by an early hour, and was able to catch a train that left Waterloo at half-past five.  He felt a little uneasy at having been away from the convalescent so long though he knew that John Saltram was now strong enough to get on tolerably without him, and that the people of the house were careful and kindly, ready at any moment to give assistance if it were wanted.

“Strange,” he thought to himself, as the train approached the quiet, river-side village—­“strange that I should be so fond of the fellow, in spite of all; that I should care more for his society than that of any man living.  It is the mere force of habit, I suppose.  After all these years of liking, the link between us is not to be broken, even by the deepest wrong that one man can do another.”