This man was John Saltram, the one intimate and chosen friend of Gilbert
Fenton's youth and manhood. They had met first at Oxford, and had seldom
lost sight of each other since the old university days. They had
travelled a good deal together during the one idle year that had preceded
Gilbert's sudden plunge into commerce. They had been up the Nile together
in the course of these wanderings; and here, remote from all civilized
aid, Gilbert had fallen ill of a fever--a long tedious business which
brought him to the very point of death, and throughout which John Saltram
had nursed him with a womanly tenderness and devotion that knew no
abatement. If this had been wanting to strengthen the tie between
them--which it was not--it would have brought them closer together. As it
was, that dreary time of sickness and peril was only a memory which
Gilbert Fenton kept in his heart of hearts, never to grow less sacred to
him until the end of life.
Mr. Saltram was a barrister, almost a briefless one at present, for his
habits were desultory, not to say idle, and he had not taken very kindly
to the slow drudgery of the Bar. He had some money of his own, and added
to his income by writing for the press in a powerful trenchant manner,
with a style that was like the stroke of a sledge-hammer. In spite of
this literary work, for which he got very well paid, Mr.
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