"Not a line."
"And have you taken no further steps, no other means of communicating with her?" Gilbert asked.
"Not yet. I think of sending my clerk down to Hampshire, or of going down myself perhaps, in a day or two, if my business engagements will permit me."
"Do you not consider the case rather an urgent one, Mr. Medler? I should have supposed that your curiosity would have been aroused by the absence of any reply to your letters—that you would have looked at the business in a more serious light than you appear to have done—that you would have taken alarm, in short."
"Why should I do so?" the lawyer demanded carelessly.
"It is Mrs. Holbrook's business to look after her affairs. The property is safe enough. She can administer to the will as soon as she pleases. I certainly wonder that the husband has not been a little sharper and more active in the business."
"You have heard nothing of him, then, I presume?"
"Nothing."
Gilbert remembered what Ellen Carley had told him about Marian's keeping the secret of her newly-acquired fortune from her husband, until she should be able to tell it to him with her own lips; waiting for that happy moment with innocent girlish delight in the thought that he was to owe prosperity to her.
It seemed evident, therefore, that Mr. Holbrook could know nothing of his wife's inheritance, nor of Mr. Medler's existence, supposing the lawyer's letter to have reached the Grange before Marian's disappearance, and to have been destroyed or carried away by her.