tterness I felt
against her at first--and I do not think I was ever very bitter--has
passed away. I am nothing now but her friend, her steadfast and constant
friend."

"Thank heaven that she has such a friend," Ellen said earnestly. "And you
will make it your business to look for her, sir?"

"The chief object of my life, from this hour."

"And you will try to discover whether her husband is really true, or
whether the search that he has made for her has been a blind to hide his
own guilt?"

"What grounds have you for supposing his guilt possible?" asked Gilbert.
"There are crimes too detestable for credibility; and this would be such
a one. You may imagine that I have no friendly feeling towards this man,
yet I cannot for an instant conceive him capable of harming a hair of his
wife's head."

"Because you have not brooded upon this business as I have, sir, for
hours and hours together, until the smallest things seem to have an awful
meaning. I have thought of every word and every look of Mr. Holbrook's in
the past, and all my thoughts have pointed one way. I believe that he was
tired of his sweet young wife; that his marriage was a burden and a
trouble to him somehow; that it had arisen out of an impulse that had
passed away."

"All this might be, and yet the man be innocent."

"He might be--yes, sir. It is a hard thing, perhaps, even to think him
guilty for a moment. But it is so difficult to account in any common way
for Mrs. Holbrook's disappearance. If there had been murder done" (the
girl shuddered as she said the words)--"a common murder, such as one
hears of in lonely country places--surely it must have come to light
before this, after the search that has been made all round about. But it
would have been easy enough for Mr. Holbrook to decoy his wife away to
London or anywhere else. She would have gone anywhere with him, at a
moment's notice. She obeyed him implicitly in everything."

"But why should he have taken her away from this place in a secret
manner?" asked Gilbert; "he was free to remove her openly. And then you
describe him as taking an amount of trouble in his search for her, which
might have been so easily avoided, had he acted with ordinary prudence
and caution. Say that he wanted to keep the secret of his marriage from
the world in which he lives, and to place his wife in even a more
secluded spot than this--which scarcely seems possible--what could have
been easier for him than to take he