"And did you think so lightly of my friendship that it was to be entrusted with nothing but what wore a pleasant aspect? True friendship surely is best shown in the encounter of difficulty and distress. I grieve, Johanna, indeed, that you have so much mistaken me."
"Nay, now you do me an injustice: it was not that I doubted your friendship for one moment, but that I did indeed shrink from casting the shadow of my sorrows over what should be, and what I hope is, the sunshine of your heart. That was the respect which deterred me from making you a confidant of, what I suppose I must call, this ill-fated passion."
"No, not ill-fated, Johanna. Let us still believe that the time will come when it will be far otherwise than ill-fated."
"But what do you think of all that I have told you? Can you gather from it any hope?"
"Abundance of hope, Johanna. You have no certainty of the death of Ingestrie."
"I certainly have not, as far as regards the loss of him in the Indian seas; but, Arabella, there is one supposition which, from the first moment that it found a home in my breast, has been growing stronger and stronger, and that supposition is, that this Mr. Thornhill was no other than Mark Ingestrie himself."
"Indeed! Think you so? That would be a strange supposition. Have you any special reasons for such a thought?"
"None—further than a something which seemed ever to tell my heart from the first moment that such was the case, and a consideration of the improbability of the story related by Thornhill. Why should Mark Ingestrie have given him the string of pearls and the message to me, trusting to the preservation of this Thornhill, and assuming, for some strange reason, that he himself must fall?"
"There is good argument in that, Johanna."
"And, moreover, Mark Ingestrie told me he intended altering his name upon the expedition."