"Well, now, tell me all about your wife. You know I have heard nothing since that one letter you wrote after you turned up again. What adventures you have had, my dear fellow! and wasn't Valmai overjoyed to see you back again?"
"No, Ellis, and that is all I can say to you now. It is a long story, and I would rather wait until later in the evening."
"All right, old fellow, in the smoking-room to-night."
And in the smoking-room that night they sat late, Cardo opening his heart to his friend, recounting to him the tale of his unfortunate illness in Australia, his return home, and the unexpected blow of Valmai's unrelenting anger and changed feelings towards him, culminating in her utter rejection of him, and refusal to live with him.
"Astounding!" said Gwynne Ellis, "I will not believe it. It is a moral impossibility that that loving nature and candid mind, could ever so change in their characteristics, as to refuse to listen to reason, and that from the lips of one whom she loved so passionately, as she did you."
"That is my feeling," said Cardo, "but alas! I have her own words to assure me of the bitter truth. 'If I ever loved you,' she said, 'I have ceased to do so, and I feel no more love for you now, than I do for yonder ploughman.' In fact, Ellis, I could not realise while I was speaking to her that she was the same girl. It was Valmai's lovely outward form, indeed, but the spirit within her seemed changed. Are such things possible?"
Ellis puffed away in silence for some seconds before he replied:
"Anything—everything is possible now-a-days; there is such a thing as hypnotism, thought transference—obsession—what will you? And any of these things I will believe sooner, than that Valmai Wynne can have changed. Cheer up, old fellow! I was born to pilot you through your love affairs, and now here's a step towards it." And from a drawer in his escritoire he drew out an ordnance map of the county of Monmouth.
"Now, let me see, where lies this wonderful place, Carne Hall, did you call it? I thought so; here it is within two miles of my new church. In a month I shall be installed into that 'living,' and my first duty when I get there shall be to find out your wife, Cardo, and to set you right in her estimation."
"Never," said Cardo; "she has encased herself in armour of cold and haughty reserve, which not even your persuasive and cordial manners will break through."