ge, when this man had been at his best, full of life
and gaiety; and then that sudden departure, which had puzzled him so much
at the time, and yet had seemed no surprise to Marian. It had been the
result of some suddenly-formed resolution perhaps, Gilbert thought.

"Poor wretch! he may have tried to be true to me," he said to himself,
with a sharp bitter pain at his heart.

He had loved this man so well, that even now, knowing himself to have
been betrayed, there was a strange mingling of pity and anger in his
mind, and mixed with these a touch of contempt. He had believed in John
Saltram; had fancied him nobler and grander than himself, somehow; a man
who, under a careless half-scornful pretence of being worse than his
fellows, concealed a nature that was far above the common herd; and yet
this man had proved the merest caitiff, a weak cowardly villain.

"To take my hand in friendship, knowing what he had done, and how my
life was broken! to pretend sympathy; to play out the miserable farce to
the very last! Great heaven! that the man I have honoured could be
capable of so much baseness!"

The sleeper moved restlessly, the eyes were opened once more and turned
upon Gilbert, not with the same utter blankness as before, but without
the faintest recognition. The sick man saw some one watching him, and the
figure was associated with an unreal presence, the phantom of his brain,
which had been with him often in the day and night.

"The man again!" he muttered. "When will she come?" And then raising
himself upon his elbow, he cried imploringly, "Mother, you fetch her!"

He was speaking to his mother, whom he had loved very dearly--his mother
who had been dead fifteen years.

Gilbert's mind went back to that far-away time in Egypt, when he had lain
like this, helpless and unconscious, and this man had nursed and watched
him with unwearying tenderness.

"I will see him safely through this," he said to himself, "and then----"

And then the account between them must be squared somehow. Gilbert Fenton
had no thought of any direful vengeance. He belonged to an age in which
injuries are taken very quietly, unless they are wrongs which the law can
redress--wounds which can be healed by a golden plaster in the way of
damages.

He could not kill his friend; the age of duelling was past, and he not
romantic enough to be guilty of such an anachronism as mortal combat. Yet
nothing less than a duel to the death could avenge suc