to establish your influence over this
fellow, and go cautiously to work with him. As long as the lady is in
France, if she be alive, and he is too ill to go after her, she is safe.
You may convince him by degrees that it is to his interest to come to
some terms with her. A formal deed of separation might be agreed upon,
and drawn up; but even that will not perfectly secure her in the
future."

I was compelled to remain satisfied with this opinion. Yet how could I
be satisfied, while Olivia, if she was still living, was wandering about
homeless, and, as I feared, destitute, in a foreign country?

I made my first call upon Foster the next evening. Mrs. Foster had been
to Brook Street every day since her return, to inquire for me, and to
leave an urgent message that I should go to Bellringer Street as soon as
I was again in town. The lodging-house looked almost as wretched as the
forsaken dwelling down at Noireau, where Olivia had perhaps been living;
and the stifling, musty air inside it almost made me gasp for breath.

"So you are come back!" was Foster's greeting, as I entered the dingy
room.

"Yes." I replied.

"I need not ask what success you've had," he said, sneering, 'Why so
pale and wan, fond lover?' Your trip has not agreed with you, that is
plain enough. It did not agree with Carry, either, for she came back
swearing she would never go on such a wild-goose chase again. You know I
was quite opposed to her going?"

"No," I said, incredulously. The diamond ring had disappeared from his
finger, and it was easy to guess how the funds had been raised for the
journey.

"Altogether opposed," he repeated. "I believe Olivia is dead. I am quite
sure she has never been under this roof with me, as Miss Ellen Martineau
has been. I should have known it as surely as ever a tiger scented its
prey. Do you suppose I have no sense keen enough to tell me she was in
the very house where I was?"

"Nonsense!" I answered. His eyes glistened cruelly, and made me almost
ready to spring upon him. I could have seized him by the throat and
shaken him to death, in my sudden passion of loathing against him; but I
sat quiet, and ejaculated "Nonsense!" Such power has the spirit of the
nineteenth century among civilized classes.

"Olivia is dead," he said, in a solemn tone. "I am convinced of that
from another reason: through all the misery of our marriage, I never
knew her guilty of an untruth, not the smallest. She was as true as the