nough
elsewhere, as you must know, Stephen, being able to turn my hand to
almost anything."

To this feeble protest Mr. Whitelaw vouchsafed no answer. He had lighted
his pipe by this time, and was smoking and staring at the fire with his
usual stolid air--meditative, it might be, or only ruminant, like one of
his own cattle.

But all through that night Mr. Whitelaw, who was not commonly a seer of
visions or dreamer of dreams, had his slumbers disturbed by some unwonted
perplexity of spirit. His wife lay broad awake, thinking of that
prolonged and piercing cry, which seemed to her, the more she meditated
upon it, in have been a cry of anguish or of terror, and could not fail
to notice this unusual disturbance of her husband's sleep. More than once
he muttered to himself in a troubled manner; but his words, for the most
part, were incoherent and disjointed--words of which that perplexed
listener could make nothing.

Once she heard him say, "A bad job--dangerous business."

CHAPTER XL.

IN PURSUIT.

John Saltram improved daily at Hampton Court. In spite of his fierce
impatience to get well, in order to engage in the search for Marian--an
impatience which was in itself sufficient to militate against his
well-being--he did make considerable progress on the road to recovery. He
was still very weak, and it must take time to complete his restoration;
but he was no longer the pale ghost of his former self that Gilbert had
brought down to the quiet suburb.

It would have been a cruel thing to leave him much alone at such a time,
or it would have seemed very cruel to Gilbert Fenton, who had ever
present in his memory those old days in Egypt when this man had stood him
in such good stead. He remembered the days of his own sickness, and
contrived to perform his business duties within the smallest time
possible, and so spend the rest of his life in the comfortable
sitting-rooms looking out upon Bushy-park on the one side, and on the
other upon the pretty high road before the Palace grounds.

Nor was there any sign in the intercourse of those two that the bond of
friendship between them was broken. There was, it is true, a something
deprecating in John Saltram's manner that had not been common to him of
old, and in Gilbert Fenton a deeper gravity than was quite natural; but
that was all. It was difficult to believe that any latent spirit of
animosity could lurk in the mind of either. In sober truth, Gilbert, in
his