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 was terribly oppressive to him, he thought that he would go down to the Vicarage. He had been told by that false one that her tidings had been sent to her friend. He took his hat and sauntered out across the fields, and did walk as far as the churchyard gate close to poor Mr. Trumbull's farm, the very spot on which he had last seen Mary Lowther; but when he was there he could not endure to go through to the Vicarage. There is something mean to a man in the want of success in love. If a man lose a venture of money he can tell his friend; or if he be unsuccessful in trying for a seat in parliament; or be thrown out of a run in the hunting-field; or even if he be blackballed for a club; but a man can hardly bring himself to tell his dearest comrade that his Mary has preferred another man to himself. This wretched fact the Fenwicks already knew as to poor Gilmore's Mary; and yet, though he had come down there, hoping for some comfort, he did not dare to face them. He went back all alone, and tumbled and tossed and fretted through the miserable night.

And the next morning was as bad. He hung about the place till about four, utterly crushed by his burden. It was a Saturday, and when the postman called no letter had yet been even written in answer to his uncle's proposition. He was moping about the grounds, with his hands in his pockets, thinking of this, when suddenly Mrs. Fenwick appeared in the path before him. There had been another consultation that morning between herself and her husband, and this visit was the result of it. He dashed at the matter immediately.

"You have come," he said, "to talk to me about Mary Lowther."

"I have come to say a word, if I can, to comfort you. Frank bade me to come."

"I have come to say a word, if I can, to comfort you."
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"There isn't any comfort," he replied.

"We knew that it would be hard to bear, my friend," she said, putting her hand within his arm; "but there is comfort."