o advertised her movements in the papers,
although for her sake he became a great student of society gossip. Also
he read with care all announcements of engagements and marriages in
_The Times_, and the deaths, too, for the matter of that, but happily
quite without result. Indeed in view of her declaration he ought to
have been, and, in fact, was, ashamed of his research; but then, who
could be quite sure of anything in this world?

Sir John, he knew, was living, because from time to time he saw his
name in lists of subscriptions of a sort that appear under royal
patronage and are largely advertised.

So between these two swung a veil of darkness, although, had he but
known it, this was not nearly so impenetrable to Isobel as to himself.
Somehow--possibly Arthur Thorburn had friends with whom he corresponded
in England who knew Isobel--she acquired information as to every detail
of his career. Indeed when he came to learn everything he was
absolutely amazed at the particulars with which she was acquainted,
whereof there were certain that he would have preferred to have kept to
himself. But she had them all, with dates and surrounding circumstances
and the rest; thousands of miles of ocean had been no bar to her
searching gaze.

For his part he was not without consolations, since, strangely enough,
he never felt as if she were lost to him, or indeed far away; it was
always as though she were in the next room, or at any rate in the next
street. There are individuals of sensitive mind, and he was one of
them, who know well enough when such a total loss has occurred. It has
been well said that the dead are never really dead to us until they are
forgotten, and the same applies to the living. While they remember us,
they are never so very far away, and what is more we, or some of us,
are quite aware if they have ceased to remember, for then the door is
shut and the doorway built up and our hearts tell us that this has been
done.

In Godfrey's case with Isobel, not only did the doorway remained
unfilled--the door itself was always ajar. Although seas divided them
and over these no whisper came, yet he felt her thought leaping to him
across the world. Especially did this happen at night when he laid
himself down to sleep, perhaps because then his mind was most
receptive, and since their hours of going to rest must have been
different, he being in India and she in England, she could scarcely
have been reflecting on him as h