one a harm to
Angela Vivian, and did she know that he had done it? This inquiry by no
means made him miserable, and it was far from awaiting him regularly
on his pillow. But it visited him at intervals, and sometimes in the
strangest places--suddenly, abruptly, in the stillness of an Indian
temple, or amid the shrillness of an Oriental crowd. He became familiar
with it at last; he called it his Jack-in-the-box. Some invisible touch
of circumstance would press the spring, and the little image would
pop up, staring him in the face and grinning an interrogation. Bernard
always clapped down the lid, for he regarded this phenomenon as
strikingly inane. But if it was more frequent than any pang of
conscience connected with the remembrance of Gordon himself, this last
sentiment was certainly lively enough to make it a great relief to hear
at last a rumor that the excellent fellow was about to be married. The
rumor reached him at Athens; it was vague and indirect, and it omitted
the name of his betrothed. But Bernard made the most of it, and took
comfort in the thought that his friend had recovered his spirits and his
appetite for matrimony.

CHAPTER XVI

It was not till our hero reached Paris, on his return from the distant
East, that the rumor I have just mentioned acquired an appreciable
consistency. Here, indeed, it took the shape of authentic information.
Among a number of delayed letters which had been awaiting him at
his banker's he found a communication from Gordon Wright. During
the previous year or two his correspondence with this trusted--and
trusting--friend had not been frequent, and Bernard had received little
direct news of him. Three or four short letters had overtaken him in his
wanderings--letters as cordial, to all appearance, if not as voluminous,
as the punctual missives of an earlier time. Bernard made a point of
satisfying himself that they were as cordial; he weighed them in the
scales of impartial suspicion. It seemed to him on the whole that there
was no relaxation of Gordon's epistolary tone. If he wrote less often
than he used to do, that was a thing that very commonly happened as men
grew older. The closest intimacies, moreover, had phases and seasons,
intermissions and revivals, and even if his friend had, in fact, averted
his countenance from him, this was simply the accomplishment of a
periodical revolution which would bring them in due order face to face
again. Bernard made a point,