He found an
inconvenience in traversing the distance between their two houses,
particularly in damp weather, the years he had spent in trying climates
abroad having sown the seeds of rheumatism, which made a journey
undesirable on inclement days, even in a carriage. He told her of this
new difficulty, as he did of everything.

'If you could live nearer,' suggested she.

Unluckily there was no house near. But Nicholas, though not a
millionaire, was a man of means; he obtained a small piece of ground on
lease at the nearest spot to her home that it could be so obtained, which
was on the opposite brink of the Froom, this river forming the boundary
of the Froom-Everard manor; and here he built a cottage large enough for
his wants. This took time, and when he got into it he found its
situation a great comfort to him. He was not more than five hundred
yards from her now, and gained a new pleasure in feeling that all sounds
which greeted his ears, in the day or in the night, also fell upon
hers--the caw of a particular rook, the voice of a neighbouring
nightingale, the whistle of a local breeze, or the purl of the fall in
the meadows, whose rush was a material rendering of Time's ceaseless
scour over themselves, wearing them away without uniting them.

Christine's missing husband was taking shape as a myth among the
surrounding residents; but he was still believed in as corporeally
imminent by Christine herself, and also, in a milder degree, by Nicholas.
For a curious unconsciousness of the long lapse of time since his
revelation of himself seemed to affect the pair. There had been no
passing events to serve as chronological milestones, and the evening on
which she had kept supper waiting for him still loomed out with startling
nearness in their retrospects.

In the seventeenth pensive year of this their parallel march towards the
common bourne, a labourer came in a hurry one day to Nicholas's house and
brought strange tidings. The present owner of Froom-Everard--a
non-resident--had been improving his property in sundry ways, and one of
these was by dredging the stream which, in the course of years, had
become choked with mud and weeds in its passage through the Sallows. The
process necessitated a reconstruction of the waterfall. When the river
had been pumped dry for this purpose, the skeleton of a man had been
found jammed among the piles supporting the edge of the fall. Every
particle of his flesh and clothing