It was not till he had been some weeks in the house that he noticed his brother-in-law's absence.
"Joseph is quite as well as usual," Mrs. Russelthorpe said coldly, in reply to his inquiry. "He fancies himself an invalid, and will never make the slightest exertion now. It's no use for you to try and see him, Charles;" and Charles did not try.
Perhaps he rather dreaded the old man's sharp-edged cynicism just then; though he need not have been afraid: Meg's uncle was quite as sore about her as was Meg's father, and a good deal more remorseful.
Very few people saw anything of Mr. Russelthorpe during the last years of his life. George Sauls declared that the poor old fellow was scandalously neglected; but then George Sauls was a good hater, and not likely to take a lenient view of Mrs. Russelthorpe.
Oddly enough, Mr. Sauls was the only person who guessed how heavily Meg's last hopeless appeal weighed on her uncle's mind. He was fiercely angry himself, inclined to quarrel (if they would give him the chance) with all Meg's relatives, to scoff at the popular sympathy for Mr. Deane, and to be unamiably sceptical when he was told that Mrs. Russelthorpe was an altered woman, and felt far more deeply than might have been supposed.
People said, indignantly, that Mr. Sauls did not show himself in at all a pleasing light; and that, considering how kind Mr. Deane had been to him, he might have exhibited more feeling for his friend's trouble; and, indeed, the worst side of the man seemed uppermost at that time.
Yet he called at the house in Bryanston Square when the Russelthorpes returned to town, showing some boldness in continuing his visits in spite of Mrs. Russelthorpe's surprised looks when they encountered each other in the hall. Mr. Russelthorpe had a liking for the young Jew, whose secret he had guessed; and though George had made his way into the library, in the first instance, from purely interested motives, being determined to know all there was to be known about Meg, yet he came again and again, from an unexpressed friendship for the queer, whimsical recluse, who was nominally master of that big house, but who was of no account whatever, and who seemed to grow lonelier and queerer as the years went by.
On the occasion of his first visit after hearing of Meg's departure, George had almost forced an entry, and had found Meg's uncle sitting almost as Meg herself had found him, save that he was making no pretence of reading now, and that his little wizened face was surmounted by a nightcap.
"Go away, I am ill!" he cried fretfully, when the door opened; but when he saw who his visitor was, he straightened himself, and held out his hand.
"Have you come to look at my Egyptian coins again, Sauls?" he asked. "You haven't heard the news then, or you would know that the study of antiquities won't repay you,—won't repay you at all."