“You are really in love!” he answered.  “I will not jest at it.  But I am ready to do any thing to help you, old boy.”

So it proved, for he and Dr. Senior did their best during the next few weeks to find a suitable opening for me.  I made their house my home, and was treated as a most welcome guest in it.  Still the time was irksome—­more irksome than I ever could have imagined.  They were busy while I was unoccupied.

Occasionally I went out to obey some urgent summons, when either of them was absent; but that was a rare circumstance.  The hours hung heavily upon me; and the close, sultry air of London, so different from the fresh sea-breezes of my native place, made me feel languid and irritable.

My mother’s letters did not tend to raise my spirits.  The tone of them was uniformly sad.  She told me the flood of sympathy for Julia had risen very high indeed:  from which I concluded that the public indignation against myself must have risen to the same tide-mark, though my poor mother said nothing about it.  Julia had resumed her old occupations, but her spirit was quite broken.  Johanna Carey had offered to go abroad with her, but she had declined it, because it would too painfully remind her of our projected trip to Switzerland.

A friend of Julia’s, said my mother in another letter, had come to stay with her, and to try to rouse her.

It was evident she did not like this Kate Daltrey, herself, for the dislike crept out unawares through all the gentleness of her phrases.  “She says she is the same age as Julia,” she wrote, “but she is probably some years older; for, as she does not belong to Guernsey, we have no opportunity of knowing.”  I laughed when I read that.  “Your father admires her very much,” she added.

No, my mother felt no affection for her new guest.

There was not a word about Olivia.  Sark itself was never mentioned, and it might have sunk into the sea.  My eye ran over every letter first, with the hope of catching that name, but I could not find it.  This persistent silence on my mother’s part was very trying.

I had been away from Guernsey two months, and Jack was making arrangements for a long absence from London as soon as the season was over, leaving me in charge, when I received the following letter from Johanna Carey: 

“DEAR MARTIN:  Your father and Julia have been here this afternoon, and have confided to me a very sad and very painful secret, which they ask me to break gently to you.  I am afraid no shadow of a suspicion of it has ever fallen upon your mind, and, I warn you, you will need all your courage and strength as a man to bear it.  I was myself so overwhelmed that I could not write to you until now, in the dead of the night, having prayed with all my heart to our merciful God to sustain and comfort you, who will feel this sorrow more than any of us.  My dearest Martin, my poor boy, how can I tell it