ht yet have a chance, whether it would be
well for him to quarrel with the man; whether he should be indignant
with her, or remonstrate once again in regard to her cruelty. He had
thought only of the blow, and of his inability to support it. Would
it not be best that he should go forth, and blow out his brains, and
have done with it?

He did not look at the letter again till he had returned to the
library. Then he took it from his pocket, and read it very carefully.
Yes, she had been quick about it. Why; how long had it been since she
had left their parish? It was still October, and she had been there
just before the murder--only the other day! Captain Walter Marrable!
No; he didn't think he had ever heard of him. Some fellow with a
moustache and a military strut--just the man that he had always
hated; one of a class which, with nothing real to recommend it, is
always interfering with the happiness of everybody. It was in some
such light as this that Mr. Gilmore at present regarded Captain
Marrable. How could such a man make a woman happy,--a fellow who
probably had no house nor home in which to make her comfortable?
Staying with his uncle the clergyman! Poor Gilmore expressed a
wish that the uncle the clergyman had been choked before he had
entertained such a guest. Then he read the concluding sentence of
poor Mary's letter, in which she expressed a hope that they might be
friends. Was there ever such cold-blooded trash? Friends indeed! What
sort of friendship could there be between two persons, one of whom
had made the other so wretched,--so dead as was he at present!

For some half-hour he tried to comfort himself with an idea that he
could get hold of Captain Marrable and maul him; that it would be a
thing permissible for him, a magistrate, to go forth with a whip and
flog the man, and then perhaps shoot him, because the man had been
fortunate in love where he had been unfortunate. But he knew the
world in which he lived too well to allow himself long to think that
this could really be done. It might be that it would be a better
world were such revenge practicable in it; but, as he well knew, it
was not practicable now, and if Mary Lowther chose to give herself to
this accursed Captain, he could not help it. There was nothing that
he could do but to go away and chafe at his suffering in some part of
the world in which nobody would know that he was chafing.

When the evening came, and he found that his solitude wa