t he had
forgotten the fact of Marian's disappearance,--a fact of which he had
seemed half-conscious long ago in his delirium.

"How did you find out that Marian was my wife?" he asked presently, with
perfect calmness. "Who betrayed my secret?"

"Your own lips, in your delirious talk of her, which has been incessant;
and if collateral evidence were needed to confirm your words, this, which
I found the other day marking a place in your Shakespeare."

Gilbert took a scrap of ribbon from his breast, a ribbon with a blue
ground and a rosebud on it,--a ribbon which he had chosen himself for
Marian, in the brief happy days of their engagement.

John Saltram contemplated the scrap of colour with a smile that was half
sombre, half ironical.

"Yes, it was hers," he said; "she wore it round that slim swan's throat
of hers; and one morning, when I was leaving her in a particularly weak
frame of mind, I took it from her neck and brought it away in my bosom,
for the sake of having something about me that she had worn; and then I
put it in the book, you see, and forgot all about it. A fitting emblem of
my love--full of passion and fervour to-day, at the point of death
to-morrow. There have been times when I would have given the world to
undo what I had done, when my life seemed blighted by this foolish
marriage; and again, happier moments, when my wife was all the universe
to me, and I had not a thought or a dream beyond her. God bless her! You
will let me go to her, Gilbert, the instant I am able to travel, as soon
as I can drag myself anyhow from this bed to the railway? You will not
stand between me and my love?"

"No, John Saltram; God knows, I have never thought of that."

"And you knew I was a traitor--you knew it was my work that had destroyed
your scheme of happiness--and yet have been beside me, watching me
patiently through this wretched illness?"

"That was a small thing to do You did as much, and a great deal more,
for me, when I was ill in Egypt. It was a mere act of duty."

"Not of friendship. It was Christian charity, eh, Gilbert? If thine enemy
hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink; and so on. It was not the
act of a friend?"

"No, John Saltram, between you and me there can never again be any such
word as friendship. What little I have done for you I think I would have
done for a stranger, had I found a stranger as helpless and unfriended as
I found you. I am quite sure that to have done less would