sed to fancy it was a dull life for
her, poor soul, sitting in his room hour after hour, working while he
wrote. He used not to allow her to be with him at all at first, but
little by little she persuaded him to let her sit with him, promising not
to disturb him by so much as a word; and she never did. She seemed quite
happy when she was with him, contented, and proud to think that her
presence was no hindrance to him."

"And you think he loved her, don't you?"

"At first, yes; but I think a kind of weariness came over him
afterwards, and that she saw it, and almost broke her heart about it.
She was so simple and innocent, poor darling, it wasn't easy for her to
hide anything she felt."

Gilbert asked the bailiff's daughter to describe Mr. Holbrook to him, as
she had done more than once before. But this time he questioned her
closely, and contrived that her description of this man's outward
semblance should be especially minute and careful.

Yes, the picture which arose before him as Ellen Carley spoke was the
picture of John Saltram. The description seemed in every particular to
apply to the face and figure of his one chosen friend. But then all such
verbal pictures are at best vague and shadowy, and Gilbert knew that he
carried that one image in his mind, and would be apt unconsciously to
twist the girl's words into that one shape. He asked if any picture or
photograph of Mr. Holbrook had been left at the Grange, and Ellen Carley
told him no, she had never even seen a portrait of Marian's husband.

He was therefore fain to be content with the description which seemed so
exactly to fit the friend he loved, the friend to whom he had clung with
a deeper, stronger feeling since this miserable suspicion had taken root
in his mind.

"I think I could have forgiven him if he had come between us in a bold
and open way," he said to himself, brooding over this harassing doubt of
his friend; "yes, I think I could have forgiven him, in spite of the
bitterness of losing her. But to steal her from me with cowardly
treacherous secrecy, to hide my treasure in an obscure corner, and then
grow weary of her, and blight her fair young life with his coldness,--can
I forgive him these things? can all the memory of the past plead with me
for him when I think of these things? O God, grant that I am mistaken;
that it is some other man who has done this, and not John Saltram; not
the man I have loved and honoured for fifteen years of my l