Mr. Holbrook--never liked or trusted him
from the first, though he has been civil enough and kind enough in his
own distant way to me. That dear young lady could not disappear off the
face of the earth, as it seems she has done, without the evil work of
some one. As to her leaving this place of her own free will, without a
word of warning to her husband or to me, that I am sure she would never
dream of doing. No, sir, there has been foul play of some kind, and I'm
afraid I shall never see that dear face again."

The girl said this with an air of conviction that sent a deadly chill to
Gilbert Fenton's heart. It seemed to him in this moment of supreme
anguish as if all his trouble of the past, all his vague fears and
anxieties about the woman he loved, had been the foreshadowing of this
evil to come. He had a blank helpless feeling, a dismal sense of his own
weakness, which for the moment mastered him. Against any ordinary
calamity he would have held himself bravely enough, with the natural
strength of an ardent hopeful character; but against this mysterious
catastrophe courage and manhood could avail nothing. She was gone, the
fragile helpless creature he had pledged himself to protect; gone from
all who knew her, leaving not the faintest clue to her fate. Could he
doubt that this energetic warm-hearted girl was right, and that some foul
deed had been done, of which Marian Holbrook was the victim?

"If she lives, I will find her," he said at last, after a long pause, in
which he had sat in gloomy silence, with his eyes fixed upon the ground,
meditating the circumstances of Marian's disappearance. "Living or dead,
I will find her. It shall be the business of my life from this hour. All
my serious thoughts have been of her from the moment in which I first
knew her. They will be doubly hers henceforward."

"How good and true you are!" Ellen Carley exclaimed admiringly; "and how
you must have loved her! I guessed when you were here last that it was
you to whom she was engaged before her marriage, and told her as much;
but she would not acknowledge that I was right. O, how I wish she had
kept faith with you! how much happier she might have been as your wife!"

"People have different notions of happiness, you see, Miss Carley,"
Gilbert answered with a bitter smile. "Yes, you were right; it was I who
was to have been Marian Nowell's husband, whose every hope of the future
was bound up in her. But all that is past; whatever bi