h I spoke, I am not free to talk about it."

Poor Adela felt herself repulsed at every point. It seemed very hard.
Had she been mistaken about this man all the time? mistaken and deluded
in those old happy days during her husband's lifetime, when he had been
so constant a visitor at the river-side villa, and had seemed exactly
what a man might seem who cherished a tenderness which he dared not
reveal in the present, but which in a brighter future might blossom into
the full-blown flower of love?

"And now about your own affairs, my dear Mrs. Branston?" John Saltram said
with a forced cheerfulness, drawing his chain up to the table and
assuming a business-like manner. "These tiresome letters of your
lawyers'; let me see what use I can be in the matter."

Adela Branston produced the letters with rather an absent air. They were
letters about very insignificant affairs; the renewal of a lease or two;
the reinvestment of a sum of money that had been lent on mortgage, and
had fallen in lately; transactions that scarcely called for the
employment of Mr. Saltram's intellectual powers. But he gave them very
serious attention nevertheless, well aware, all the time that this
business consultation was only the widow's excuse for her visit; and
while she seemed to be listening to his advice, her eyes were wandering
round the room all the time, noting the dust and confusion, the
soda-water bottles huddled in one corner, the pile of books heaped in a
careless mass in another, the half-empty brandy-bottle between a couple of
stone ink-jars on the mantelpiece. She was thinking what a dreary place
it was, and that there was the stamp of decay and ruin somehow upon the
man who occupied it. And she loved him so well, and would have given all
the world to have redeemed his life.

It is doubtful whether Adela Branston heard one syllable of that counsel
which Mr. Saltram administered so gravely. Her mind was full of the
failure of this desperate step which she had taken. He seemed farther
from her now than before they had met, obstinately adverse to profit by
her friendship, cold and cruel.

"You will come and dine with us very soon, I hope," she said as she rose
to go, "My cousin, Mrs. Pallinson, will be home in a day or two. She has
been nursing her son for the last few days; but he is much better, and I
expect her back immediately. We shall be so pleased to see you; you will
name an early day, won't you? Monday shall we say, or Sunday?