And he, too, came to a
resolution, but not of the same kind. He would speak to Francis Markrute
when they arrived on Friday night and he could get him quietly alone. He
would tell him that the whole thing was a ghastly failure, but as he had
only himself to blame for entering into it he did not intend to reproach
any one. Only, he would frankly ask him to use his clever brain and
invent some plan that he and Zara could separate, without scandal, until
such time as he should grow indifferent, and so could come back and
casually live in the house with her. He was only a human man, he
admitted, and the present arrangement was impossible to bear. He was
past the anguish of the mockery of everything to-night--he was simply
numb. Then some waiting fiend made him think of Laura and her last
words. What if there were some truth in them after all? He had himself
seen the man twice, under the most suspicious circumstances. What if he
were her lover? How could Francis Markrute know of all her existence,
when he had said she had been an immaculate wife? And gradually, on top
of his other miseries, trifles light as air came and tortured him until
presently he had worked up a whole chain of evidence, proving the lover
theory to be correct!

Then he shook in his chair with rage, and muttered between his teeth:
"If I find this is true then I will kill him, and kill her, also!"

So near to savages are all human beings, when certain passions are
aroused. And neither bride nor bridegroom guessed that fate would soon
take things out of their hands and make their resolutions null and
void.

CHAPTER XXXVI

The gardens at Wrayth were famous. The natural beauty of their position
and the endless care of generations of loving mistresses had left them a
monument of what nature can be trained into by human skill. They had
also in the eighteenth century by some happy chance escaped the hand of
Capability Brown. And instead of pulling about and altering the taste of
the predecessor the successive owners had used fresh ground for their
fancies. Thus the English rose-garden and the Dutch-clipped yews of
William-and-Mary's time were as intact as the Italian parterre.

But November is not the time to judge of gardens, and Tristram wished
the sun would come out. He waited for his bride at the foot of the Adam
staircase, and, at eleven, she came down. He watched her as she put one
slender foot before the other in her descent, he had not noticed