ampshire, he felt vexed with
himself for not having urged her to speak freely--not having considered
her suspicions, however preposterous those suspicions might have appeared
to him.

Marian's disappearance had taken a darker colour in his mind since that
time. Granted that she had left the Grange of her own accord, having some
special reason for leaving secretly, at whose bidding would she have so
acted except her husband's--she who stood so utterly alone, without a
friend in the world? But what possible motive could Mr. Holbrook have had
for such an underhand course--for making a conspiracy and a mystery out
of so simple a fact as the removal of his wife from a place whence he was
free to remove her at any moment? Fair and honest motive for such a
course there could be none. Was it possible, looking at the business from
a darker point of view, to imagine any guilty reason for the carrying out
of such a plot? If this man had wanted to bring about a life-long
severance between himself and his wife, to put her away somewhere, to
keep her hidden from the eyes of the world--in plainer words, to get rid
of her--might not this pretence of losing her, this affectation of
distress at her loss, be a safe way of accomplishing his purpose? Who
else was interested in doing her any wrong? Who else could have had
sufficient power over her to beguile her away from her home?

Pondering on these questions throughout all that weary journey across a
wintry landscape of bare brown fields and leafless trees, Gilbert Fenton
travelled London-wards, to the city which was so little of a home for
him, but in which his life had seemed pleasant enough in its own
commonplace fashion until that fatal summer evening when he first saw
Marian Nowell's radiant face in the quiet church at Lidford.

He scarcely stopped to eat or drink at the end of his journey, regaling
himself only with a bottle of soda-water, imperceptibly flavoured with
cognac by the hands of a ministering angel at the refreshment-counter of
the Waterloo Station, and then hurrying on at once in a hansom to that
dingy street in Soho where Mr. Medler sat in his parlour, like the
proverbial spider waiting for the advent of some too-confiding fly.

The lawyer was at home, and seemed in no way surprised to see Mr. Fenton.

"I have come to you about a bad business, Mr. Medler," Gilbert began,
seating himself opposite the shabby-looking office-table, with its
covering of dusty faded baiz