To John Saltram’s recovery he looked also as to his best chance of restoring Marian to her natural home.  The influence that he himself was powerless to bring to bear upon Percival Nowell’s daughter might be easily exerted by her husband.

“She was lured away from him, perhaps, by some specious lie of her father’s, some cruel slander of the husband.  There had been bitter words between them.  Saltram has betrayed as much in his wandering talk; but to the last there was no feeling but love for him in her heart.  Ellen Carley is my witness for that; nothing less than some foul lie could have tempted her away from him.”

In the meantime, pending the sick man’s recovery, the grand point was to discover the whereabouts of Marian and her father; and for this discovery Gilbert was compelled to trust to the resources of the accomplished Proul.  So eager was he for the result, that if be could have kept a watch upon Mr. Medler’s office with his own eyes, he would have done so; but this being out of the question, and the more prudent course a complete avoidance of the lawyer’s neighbourhood, he could only await the result of his paid agent’s researches, in the hope that Mr. Nowell was still in London, and would have need of frequent communication with his late father’s solicitor.  The first month of the year dragged itself slowly to an end, and the great city underwent all those pleasing alternations, from snow to mud, from the slipperiness of a city paved with plate-glass to the sloppiness of a metropolis ankle-deep in a rich brown compound of about the consistency and colour of mock-turtle soup, which are common to great cities at this season; and still John Saltram lingered on in the shabby solitude of his Temple chambers, slowly mending, Mr. Mew declared, towards the end of the month, and in a fair way towards recovery.  The time came at last when the fevered mind began to cease from its perpetual wanderings; when the weary brain, sorely enfeebled by its long interval of unnatural activity, dropped suddenly into a state of calm that was akin to apathy.

The change came with an almost alarming suddenness.  It was at the beginning of February, close upon the dead small hours of a bleak windy night, and Gilbert was keeping watch alone in the sick-room, while the professional nurse slept comfortably on the sofa in the sitting-room.  It was his habit now to spend the early part of the night in such duty as this, and to go home to bed between four and five in the morning, at which time the nurse was ready to relieve guard.

He had been listening to the dismal howling of the winds, threatening damage to neighbouring chimney-pots of rickety constitution, and thinking idly of the men that had come and gone amidst those old buildings, and how few amongst them all had left any mark behind them; inclined to speculate too how many of them had been men capable of better work than they had done, only carelessly indifferent to the doing of it, like him who lay on that bed yonder, with one muscular arm, powerful even in its wasted condition, thrown wearily above his head, and an undefinable look, that seemed half pain, half fatigue, upon his haggard face.