t I am your
friend. I shall be happy to go with you on Sunday, if you really wish
it."

"I do really wish it. I shall drop Mrs. Branston a line to say you will
come. She asked me to bring you whenever I had an opportunity. The
dinner-hour is seven. I'll call for you here a few minutes before. I
don't promise you a very lively evening, remember. There will only be
Adela, and a lady she has taken as her companion."

"I don't care about lively evenings. I have been nowhere in society
since I returned from Melbourne. I have done with all that kind of
thing."

"My dear Gilbert, that sort of renunciation will never do," John Saltram
said earnestly. "A man cannot turn his back upon society at your age.
Life lies all before you, and it rests with yourself to create a happy
future. Let the dead bury their dead."

"Yes, John; and what is left for the living when that burial is over? I
don't want to make myself obnoxious by whining over my troubles, but they
are not to be lessened by philosophy, and I can do nothing but bear them
as best I may. I had long been growing tired of society, in the
conventional acceptation of the word, and all the stereotyped pleasures
of a commercial man's life. Those things are less than nothing when a man
has nothing brighter and fairer beyond them--no inner life by which the
common things of this world are made precious. It is only dropping out of
the arena a little earlier than I might have done otherwise. I have a
notion that I shall wind up my affairs next year, sell my business, and
go abroad. I could manage to retire upon a very decent income, in spite
of my losses the other day."

"Don't dream of that, Gilbert; for heaven's sake, don't dream of anything
so mad as that. What would a man of your age be without some kind of
career? A mere purposeless wanderer on the face of the earth. Stick to
business, dear old fellow. Believe me, there is nothing like work to make
a man forget any foolish trouble of this kind. And you will forget it,
Gilbert, be assured of that. If I were not certain it would be so, I
should----"

He stopped suddenly, staring absently at the fire with a darkening brow.

"You would do what, John?"

"Hate this man Holbrook almost as savagely as you hate him, for having
come between you and your happiness. Yet, if Marian Nowell did not love
you--as a wife should love her husband, with all her heart and soul--it
was ten thousand times better that the knot should be cut in