last there was no feeling but love for him in her heart. Ellen Carley
is my witness for that; nothing less than some foul lie could have
tempted her away from him."

In the meantime, pending the sick man's recovery, the grand point was to
discover the whereabouts of Marian and her father; and for this discovery
Gilbert was compelled to trust to the resources of the accomplished
Proul. So eager was he for the result, that if be could have kept a watch
upon Mr. Medler's office with his own eyes, he would have done so; but
this being out of the question, and the more prudent course a complete
avoidance of the lawyer's neighbourhood, he could only await the result
of his paid agent's researches, in the hope that Mr. Nowell was still in
London, and would have need of frequent communication with his late
father's solicitor. The first month of the year dragged itself slowly to
an end, and the great city underwent all those pleasing alternations,
from snow to mud, from the slipperiness of a city paved with plate-glass
to the sloppiness of a metropolis ankle-deep in a rich brown compound of
about the consistency and colour of mock-turtle soup, which are common
to great cities at this season; and still John Saltram lingered on in the
shabby solitude of his Temple chambers, slowly mending, Mr. Mew declared,
towards the end of the month, and in a fair way towards recovery. The
time came at last when the fevered mind began to cease from its perpetual
wanderings; when the weary brain, sorely enfeebled by its long interval
of unnatural activity, dropped suddenly into a state of calm that was
akin to apathy.

The change came with an almost alarming suddenness. It was at the
beginning of February, close upon the dead small hours of a bleak windy
night, and Gilbert was keeping watch alone in the sick-room, while the
professional nurse slept comfortably on the sofa in the sitting-room. It
was his habit now to spend the early part of the night in such duty as
this, and to go home to bed between four and five in the morning, at
which time the nurse was ready to relieve guard.

He had been listening to the dismal howling of the winds, threatening
damage to neighbouring chimney-pots of rickety constitution, and thinking
idly of the men that had come and gone amidst those old buildings, and
how few amongst them all had left any mark behind them; inclined to
speculate too how many of them had been men capable of better work than
they had done