“Very pleasant! and you will make an admirable family man, Gil.  You have none of the faults that render me ineligible for the married state.  I think your Marian is a very fortunate girl.  What is her surname, by the way?”

“Nowell.”

“Marian Nowell—­a very pretty name!  When do you think of going back to Lidford?”

“In about a month.  My brother-in-law wants me to go back to them for the 1st of September.”

“Then I think I shall run down to Forster’s, and have a pop at the pheasants.  It will give me an opportunity of being presented to Miss Nowell.”

“I shall be very pleased to introduce you, old fellow.  I know that you will admire her.”

“Well, I am not a very warm admirer of the sex in general; but I am sure to like your future wife, Gil, if it is only because you have chosen her.”

“And your own affairs, Jack—­how have they been going on?”

“Not very brightly.  I am not a lucky individual, you know.  Destiny and I have been at odds ever since I was a schoolboy.”

“Not in love yet, John?”

“No,” the other answered, with rather a gloomy look.

He was sitting on a corner of the ponderous desk in a lounging attitude, gazing meditatively at his boots, and hitting one of them now and then with a cane he carried, in a restless kind of way.

“You see, the fact of the matter is, Gil,” he began at last, “as I told you just now, if ever I do marry, mercenary considerations are likely to be at the bottom of the business.  I don’t mean to say that I would marry a woman I disliked, and take it out of her in ill-usage or neglect.  I am not quite such a scoundrel as that.  But if I had the luck to meet with a woman I could like, tolerably pretty and agreeable, and all that kind of thing, and weak enough to care for me—­a woman with a handsome fortune—­I should be a fool not to snap at such a chance.”

“I see,” exclaimed Gilbert, “you have met with such a woman.”

“I have.”

Again the gloomy look came over the dark strongly-marked face, the thick black eyebrows contracted in a frown, and the cane was struck impatiently against John Saltram’s boot.

“But you are not in love with her; I see that in your face, Jack.  You’ll think me a sentimental fool, I daresay, and fancy I look at things in a new light now that I’m down a pit myself; but, for God’s sake, don’t marry a woman you can’t love.  Tolerably pretty and agreeable won’t do, Jack,—­that means indifference on your part; and, depend upon it, when a man and woman are tied together for life, there is only a short step from indifference to dislike.”