“You don’t mind my reading your father’s letters, Marian?” he asked.

“Not at all.  Only I think you will find them very uninteresting.”

“I am interested in everything that concerns you.”

He put the papers in his pocket, and sat up for an hour in his room that night reading Percival Nowell’s love letters.  They revealed very little to him, except the unmitigated selfishness of the writer.  That quality exhibited itself in every page.  The lovers had met for the first time at the house of some Mr. Crosby, in whose family Miss Geoffry seemed to be living; and there were clandestine meetings spoken of in the Regent’s Park, for which reason Gilbert supposed Mr. Crosby’s house must have been in that locality.  There were broken appointments, for which Miss Geoffry was bitterly reproached by her lover, who abused the whole Crosby household in a venomous manner for having kept her at home at these times.

“If you loved me, as you pretend, Lucy,” Mr. Nowell wrote on one occasion, “you would speedily exchange this degrading slavery for liberty and happiness with me, and would be content to leave the future utterly in my hands, without question or fear.  A really generous woman would do this.”

There was a good deal more to the same effect, and it seemed as if the proposal of marriage came at last rather reluctantly; but it did come, and was repeated, and urged in a very pressing manner; while Lucy Geoffry to the last appeared to have hung back, as if dreading the result of that union.

The letters told little of the writer’s circumstances or social status.  Whenever he alluded to his father, it was with anger and contempt, and in a manner that implied some quarrel between them; but there was nothing to indicate what kind of man the father was.

Gilbert Fenton took the packet back to the cottage next morning.  He was to return to London that afternoon, and had only a few hours to spend with Marian.  The day was dull and cold, but there was no rain; and they walked together in the garden, where the leaves were beginning to fall, and whence every appearance of summer seemed to have vanished since Gilbert’s last visit.

For some time they were both rather silent, pacing thoughtfully up and down the sheltered walk that bounded the lawn.  Gilbert found it impossible to put on an appearance of hopefulness on this last day.  It was better wholly to give up the attempt, and resign himself to the gloom that brooded over him, shutting out the future.  That airy castle of his—­the villa on the banks of the Thames—­seemed to have faded and vanished altogether.  He could not look beyond the Australian journey to the happy time of his return.  The hazards of time and distance bewildered him.  He felt an unspeakable dread of the distance that was to divide him from Marian Nowell—­a dread that grew stronger with every hour.  He was destined to suffer a fresh pang before the moment of parting came.  Marian turned to him by-and-by with an earnest anxious face, and said,—­