He made his head-quarters in the cathedral city for nearly a week, and explored the country round, in a radius of thirty miles, without the faintest success.  It was fine autumn weather, calm and clear, the foliage still upon the trees, in all its glory of gold and brown, with patches of green lingering here and there in sheltered places.  The country was very beautiful, and Gilbert Fenton’s work would have been pleasant enough if the elements of peace had been in his breast.  But they were not.  Bitter regrets for all he had lost, uneasy fears and wild imaginings about the fate of her whom he still loved with a fond useless passion,—­these and other gloomy thoughts haunted him day by flay, clouding the calm loveliness of the scenes on which he looked, until all outer things seemed to take their colour from his own mind.  He had loved Marian Nowell as it is not given to many men to love; and with the loss of her, it seemed to him as if the very springs of his life were broken.  All the machinery of his existence was loosened and out of gear, and he could scarcely have borne the dreary burden of his days, had it not been for that one feverish hope of finding the man who had wronged him.

The week ended without bringing him in the smallest degree nearer the chance of success.  Happily for himself, he had not expected to succeed in a week.  On leaving Winchester, he started on a kind of vagabond tour through the county, on a horse which he hired in the cathedral city, and which carried him from twenty to thirty miles a day.  This mode of travelling enabled him to explore obscure villages and out-of-the-way places that lay off the line of railway.  Everywhere he made the same inquiries, everywhere with the same result.  Another week came to an end.  He had made his voyage of discovery through more than half of the county, as his pocket-map told him, and was still no nearer success than when he left London.

He spent his Sunday at a comfortable inn in a quiet little town, where there was a curious old church, and a fine peal of bells that seemed to him to be ringing all day long.  It was a dull rainy day.  He went to church in the morning, and in the afternoon stood at the coffee-room window watching the townspeople going by to their devotions in an absent unseeing way, and thinking of his own troubles; pausing, just a little, now and then, from that egotistical brooding to wonder how these people endured the dull monotonous round of their lives, and what crosses and disappointments they had to suffer in their small obscure way.

The inn was very empty, and the landlord waited upon Mr. Fenton in person at his dinner.  Gilbert had the coffee-room all to himself, and it looked comfortable enough when the curtains were drawn, the lamps lighted, and the small dinner-table wheeled in front of a blazing fire.

“I have been thinking over what you were asking me last night, sir,” the host of the White Swan began, while Gilbert was eating his fish; “and though I can’t say that I ever heard the name of Holbrook, I fancy I may have seen the lady and gentleman you are looking for.”