lence on hers, constantly more
and more strikingly visible. Neglect, disorder, and decay, too, were more
than ever apparent in the dreary air of the place.

Doctor Danvers, save by rumor and conjecture, knew nothing of Marston
and his abandoned companion. He had, more than once, felt a strong
disposition to visit Gray Forest, and expostulate, face to face, with its
guilty proprietor. This idea, however, he had, upon consideration,
dismissed; not on account of any shrinking from the possible repulses and
affronts to which the attempt might subject him, but from a thorough
conviction that the endeavor would be utterly fruitless for good, while
it might, very obviously, expose him to painful misinterpretation and
suspicion, and leave it to be imagined that he had been influenced, if by
no meaner motive, at least by the promptings of a coarse curiosity.

Meanwhile he maintained a correspondence with Mrs. Marston, and had even
once or twice since her departure visited her. Latterly, however, this
correspondence had been a good deal interrupted, and its intervals had
been supplied occasionally by Rhoda, whose letters, although she herself
appeared unconscious of the mournful event the approach of which they
too plainly indicated, were painful records of the rapid progress of
mortal decay.

He had just received one of those ominous letters, at the little post
office in the town we have already mentioned, and, full of the melancholy
news it contained, Dr. Danvers was returning slowly towards his home. As
he rode into a lonely road, traversing an undulating tract of some three
miles in length, the singularity, it may be, of his costume attracted the
eye of another passenger, who was, as it turned out, no other than
Marston himself. For two or three miles of this desolate road, their ways
happened to lie together. Marston's first impulse was to avoid the
clergyman; his second, which he obeyed, was to join company, and ride
along with him, at all events, for so long as would show that he shrank
from no encounter which fortune or accident presented. There was a spirit
of bitter defiance in this, which cost him a painful effort.

"How do you do, Parson Danvers?" said Marston, touching his hat with the
handle of his whip.

Danvers thought he had seldom seen a man so changed in so short a time.
His face had grown sallow and wasted, and his figure slightly stooped,
with an appearance almost of feebleness.

"Mr. Marston," said the