“His money matters may have fallen into a desperate condition,” he thought; “or perhaps that woman—­that Mrs. Branston, is at the bottom of the business.”

He went to the cottage that morning as usual, but not with his accustomed feeling of unalloyed happiness.  The serene heaven of his tranquil life was clouded a little by this strange conduct of John Saltram’s.  It wounded him to think that his old companion was keeping a secret from him.

“I suppose it is because I lectured him a little about Mrs. Branston the other day,” he said to himself.  “The business is connected with her in some way, I daresay, and poor Jack does not care to arouse my virtuous indignation.  That comes of taking a high moral tone with one’s friend.  He swallows the pill with a decent grace at the time, and shuts one out of his confidence ever afterwards.”

Captain Sedgewick expressed himself much surprised and disappointed by Mr. Saltram’s departure.  Marian said very little upon the subject.  There seemed nothing extraordinary to her in the fact that a gentleman should be summoned to London by the claims of business.

Gilbert might have brooded longer upon the mystery involved in his friend’s conduct, but that evening’s post brought him trouble in the shape of bad news from Melbourne.  His confidential clerk—­an old man who had been with his father for many years, and who knew every intricacy of the business—­wrote him a very long letter, dwelling upon the evil fortune which attended all their Australian transactions of late, and hinting at dishonesty and double-dealing on the part of Gilbert’s cousin, Astley Fenton, the local manager.

The letter was a very sensible one, calculated to arouse a careless man from a false sense of security.  Gilbert was so much disturbed by it, that he determined upon going back to London by the earliest fast train next morning.  It was cutting short his holiday only by a few days.  He had meant to return at the beginning of the following week, and he felt that he had already some reason to reproach himself for his neglect of business.

He left Lidford happy in the thought that Captain Sedgewick and Marian were to come to London in October.  The period of separation would be something less than a month.  And after that?  Well, he would of course spend Christmas at Lidford; and he fancied how the holly and mistletoe, the church-decorations and carol-singing, and all the stereotyped genialities of the season,—­things that had seemed trite and dreary to him since the days of his boyhood,—­would have a new significance and beauty for him when he and Marian kept the sacred festival together.  And then how quickly would begin the new year, the year whose spring-tide would see them man and wife!  Perhaps there is no period of this mortal life so truly happy as that in which all our thoughts are occupied in looking forward to some great joy to come.  Whether the joy, when it does come, is ever so unqualified a delight as it seemed in the distance, or whether it ever comes at all, are questions which we have all solved for ourselves somehow or other.  To Gilbert Fenton these day-dreams were bright and new, and he was troubled by no fear of their not being realized.