t to Gilbert's
heart somehow.

"O God, how fond I was of him!" he said to himself. "And if he has been a
traitor! If he were to die like this, before I have wrung the truth from
him--to die, and I not dare to cherish his memory--to be obliged to live
out my life with this doubt of him!"

This doubt! Had he much reason to doubt two minutes afterwards, when
John Saltram raised himself on his gaunt arm, and looked piteously round
the room?

"Marian!" he called. "Marian!"

"Yes," muttered Gilbert, "it is all true. He is calling his wife."

The revelation scarcely seemed a surprise to him. Little by little that
suspicion, so vague and dim at first, had gathered strength, and now that
all his doubts received confirmation from those unconscious lips, it
seemed to him as if he had known his friend's falsehood for a long time.

"Marian, come here. Come, child, come," the sick man cried in feeble
imploring tones. "What, are you afraid of me? Is this death? Am I dead,
and parted from her? Would anything else keep her from me when I call for
her, the poor child that loved me so well? And I have wished myself free
of her--God forgive me!--wished myself free."

The words were muttered in broken gasping fragments of sentences; but
Gilbert heard them and understood them very easily. Then, after looking
about the room, and looking full at Gilbert without seeing him, John
Saltram fell back upon his tumbled pillows and closed his eyes. Gilbert
heard a slipshod step in the outer room, and turning round, found himself
face to face with the laundress--that mature and somewhat depressing
matron whom he had sought out a little time before, when he wanted to
discover Mr. Saltram's whereabouts.

This woman, upon seeing him, burst forth immediately into jubilation.

"O, sir, what a providence it is that you've come!" she cried. "Poor dear
gentleman, he has been that ill, and me not knowing what to do more than
a baby, except in the way of sending for a doctor when I see how bad he
was, and waiting on him myself day and night, which I have done faithful,
and am that worn-out in consequence, that I shake like a haspen, and
can't touch a bit of victuals. I had but just slipped round to the court,
while he was asleep, poor dear, to give my children their dinner; for
it's a hard trial, sir, having a helpless young family depending upon
one; and it would but be fair that all I have gone through should be
considered; for though I says it as sh