“Then you know how deeply he sinned against you, and how much he valued your friendship?  He would never have played so false a part but for that.  He could not bear to think of being estranged from you.”

“We are not estranged.  I have tried to be angry with him; but there are some old ties that a man cannot break.  He has used me very ill, Marian; but he is still my friend.”

His voice broke a little as he uttered the old familiar name.  Yes, she was changed, cruelly changed, by that ordeal of six months’ suffering.  The brightness of her beauty had quite faded; but there was something in the altered face that touched him more deeply than the old magic.  She was dearer to him, perhaps, in this hour than she had ever been yet.  Dearer to him, and yet divided from him utterly, now that he professed himself her husband’s friend as well as her own.

Friendship, brotherly affection, those chastened sentiments which he had fancied had superseded all warmer feelings—­where were they now?  By the passionate beating of his heart, by his eager longing to clasp that faded form to his breast, he knew that he loved her as dearly as on the day when she promised to be his wife; that he must love her with the same measure till the end of his existence.

“Thank God for that,” Marian said gently; “thank God that you are still friends.  But why did he not come with you to-day?  You have told him about me, I suppose?”

“Not yet, Marian; I have not been able to do that.  Nor could he come with me to-day.  He has left England—­on a false scent.”

And then he told her, in a few words, the story of John Saltram’s voyage to New York; making very light of the matter, and speaking cheerily of his early return.

“He will come back at once, of course, when he finds how he has been deceived,” Gilbert said.

Marian was cruelly distressed by this disappointment.  She tried to bear the blow bravely, and listened with a gentle patience to Gilbert’s reassuring arguments; but it was a hard thing to bear.

“He will be back soon, you say,” she said; “but soon is such a vague word; and you have not told me when he went.”

Gilbert told her the date of John Saltram’s departure.  She began immediately to question him as to the usual length of the voyage, and to calculate the time he had had for his going and return.  Taking the average length of the voyage as ten days, and allowing ten days for delay in New York, a month would give ample time for the two journeys; and John Saltram had been away more than a month.

Gilbert could see that Marian was quick to take alarm on discovering this.

“My dear Mrs. Saltram, be reasonable,” he said gently.  “Finding such a cheat put upon him, your husband would naturally be anxious to bring your father to some kind of reckoning, to extort from him the real secret of your fate.  He would no doubt stay in New York to do this; and we cannot tell how difficult the business might prove, or how long it would occupy him.”