Edward Arundel looked at his attendant with unmitigated surprise.
"My cousin Olivia marry Paul Marchmont!" he exclaimed. "You should be wiser than to listen to such foolish gossip, Morrison. You know what country people are, and you know they can't keep their tongues quiet."
Mr. Morrison took this reproach as a compliment to his superior intelligence.
"It ain't oftentimes as I listens to their talk, sir," he said; "but if I've heard this said once, I've heard it twenty times; and I've heard it at the Black Bull, too, Mr. Edward, where Mr. Marchmont fre_quents_ sometimes with his sister's husband; and the landlord told me as it had been spoken of once before his face, and he didn't deny it."
Edward Arundel pondered gravely over this gossip of the Kemberling people. It was not so very improbable, perhaps, after all. Olivia only held Marchmont Towers on sufferance. It might be that, rather than be turned out of her stately home, she would accept the hand of its rightful owner. She would marry Paul Marchmont, perhaps, as she had married his brother,—for the sake of a fortune and a position. She had grudged Mary her wealth, and now she sought to become a sharer in that wealth.
"Oh, the villany, the villany!" cried the soldier. "It is all one base fabric of treachery and wrong. A marriage between these two will be only a part of the scheme. Between them they have driven my darling to her death, and they will now divide the profits of their guilty work."
The young man determined to discover whether there had been any foundation for the Kemberling gossip. He had not seen his cousin since the day of his discovery of the paragraph in the newspaper, and he went forthwith to the Towers, bent on asking Olivia the straight question as to the truth of the reports that had reached his ears.
He walked over to the dreary mansion. He had regained his strength by this time, and he had recovered his good looks; but something of the brightness of his youth was gone; something of the golden glory of his beauty had faded. He was no longer the young Apollo, fresh and radiant with the divinity of the skies. He had suffered; and suffering had left its traces on his countenance. That smiling hopefulness, that supreme confidence in a bright future, which is the virginity of beauty, had perished beneath the withering influence of affliction.
Mrs. Marchmont was not to be seen at the Towers. She had gone down to the boat-house with Mr. Paul Marchmont and Mrs. Weston, the servant said.
"I will see them together," Edward Arundel thought. "I will see if my cousin dares to tell me that she means to marry this man."