r away when and where he pleased? No
one here would have had any right to question his actions."

Ellen Carley shook her head doubtfully.

"I don't know, sir," she answered slowly; "I daresay my fancies are very
foolish; they may have come, perhaps, out of thinking about this so much,
till my brain has got addled, as one may say. But it flashed upon me all
of a sudden one night, as Mr. Holbrook was standing in our parlour
talking about his wife--it flashed upon me that he was in the secret of
her disappearance, and that he was only acting with us in his pretence of
anxiety and all that; I fancied there was a guilty look in his face,
somehow."

"Did you tell him about his wife's good fortune--the money left her by
her grandfather?"

"I did, sir; I thought it right to tell him everything I could about my
poor dear young lady's journey to London. She had told him of that in her
letters, it seemed, but not about the money. She had been keeping that
back for the pleasure of telling him with her own lips, and seeing his
face light up, she said to me, when he heard the good news. I asked him
about the letter which had come in the morning of the day she
disappeared, and whether it was from him; but he said no, he had not
written, counting upon being with his wife that evening. It was only at
the last moment he was prevented coming."

"You have looked for that letter, I suppose?"

"O yes, sir; I searched, and Mr. Holbrook too, in every direction, but
the letter wasn't to be found. He seemed very vexed about it, very
anxious to find it. We could not but think that Mrs. Holbrook had gone to
meet some one that day, and that the letter had something to do with her
going out. I am sure she would not have gone beyond the garden and the
meadow for pleasure alone. She never had been outside the gate without
me, except when she went to meet her husband."

"Strange!" muttered Gilbert.

He was wondering about that letter: what could have been the lure which
had beguiled Marian away from the house that day; what except a letter
from her husband? It seemed hardly probable that she would have gone to
meet any one but him, or that any one else would have appointed a meeting
on the river-bank. The fact that she had gone out at an earlier hour than
the time at which she had been in the habit of meeting her husband when
he came from the Malsham station, went some way to prove that the letter
had influenced her movements. Gilbert thought