remarkable for any
new facts. He was fain to listen to it with a show of patience, however,
and to consent to eat a mutton chop which the good woman insisted upon
cooking for him, after his confession that he had eaten nothing since
breakfast. He kept telling himself that there was no hurry; that he was
not wanted in Coleman-street; that his presence there was a question of
his own gratification and nothing else; but the fever in his mind was not
to be set at rest go easily. There was a sense of hurry upon him that he
could not shake off, argue with himself as wisely as he would.

He took a hasty meal, and started off to the railway station directly
afterwards, though there was no train to carry, him back to London for
nearly an hour.

It was weary work waiting at the little station, while the keen March
wind blew sharply across the unsheltered platform on which Gilbert paced
to and fro in his restlessness; weary work waiting, with that sense of
hurry and anxiety upon him, not to be shaken off by any effort he could
make to take a hopeful view of the future. He tried to think of those two
whom he loved best on earth, whose union he had taught himself, by a
marvellous effort of unselfishness, to contemplate with serenity, tried
to think of them in the supreme happiness of their restoration to each
other; but he could not bring his mind to the realisation of this
picture. After all those torments of doubt and perplexity which he had
undergone during the last three months, the simple fact of Marian's
safety seemed too good a thing to be true. He was tortured by a vague
sense of the unreality of this relief that had come so suddenly to put an
end to all perplexities.

"I feel as if I were the victim of some hoax, some miserable delusion,"
he said to himself. "Not till I see her, not till I clasp her by the
hand, shall I believe that she is really given back to us."

And in his eagerness to do this, to put an end to that slow torture of
unreasonable doubt which had come upon him since the reading of John
Saltram's letter, the delay at the railway station was an almost
intolerable ordeal; but the hour came to an end at last, the place awoke
from its blank stillness to a faint show of life and motion, a door or
two banged, a countrified-looking young woman with a good many bundles
and a band-box came out of the waiting-room and arranged her possessions
in readiness for the coming train, a porter emerged lazily from some
u