r pocket, and look
them over at your leisure when you get home. You can bring them back
before you leave Lidford."

Mr. Fenton glanced at Marian to see if she had any objection to his
reading the letters. She was quite silent, looking absently at the
trinkets lying in the tray before her.

"You don't mind my reading your father's letters, Marian?" he asked.

"Not at all. Only I think you will find them very uninteresting."

"I am interested in everything that concerns you."

He put the papers in his pocket, and sat up for an hour in his room that
night reading Percival Nowell's love letters. They revealed very little
to him, except the unmitigated selfishness of the writer. That quality
exhibited itself in every page. The lovers had met for the first time at
the house of some Mr. Crosby, in whose family Miss Geoffry seemed to be
living; and there were clandestine meetings spoken of in the Regent's
Park, for which reason Gilbert supposed Mr. Crosby's house must have been
in that locality. There were broken appointments, for which Miss Geoffry
was bitterly reproached by her lover, who abused the whole Crosby
household in a venomous manner for having kept her at home at these
times.

"If you loved me, as you pretend, Lucy," Mr. Nowell wrote on one
occasion, "you would speedily exchange this degrading slavery for liberty
and happiness with me, and would be content to leave the future _utterly_
in my hands, without question or fear. A really generous woman would do
this."

There was a good deal more to the same effect, and it seemed as if the
proposal of marriage came at last rather reluctantly; but it did come,
and was repeated, and urged in a very pressing manner; while Lucy Geoffry
to the last appeared to have hung back, as if dreading the result of that
union.

The letters told little of the writer's circumstances or social status.
Whenever he alluded to his father, it was with anger and contempt, and in
a manner that implied some quarrel between them; but there was nothing to
indicate what kind of man the father was.

Gilbert Fenton took the packet back to the cottage next morning. He was
to return to London that afternoon, and had only a few hours to spend
with Marian. The day was dull and cold, but there was no rain; and they
walked together in the garden, where the leaves were beginning to fall,
and whence every appearance of summer seemed to have vanished since
Gilbert's last visit.

For some time they