"Ill," Gilbert muttered, looking aghast at this dreary picture, with
strangely conflicting feelings of pity and anger in his breast; "struck
down at the very moment when I had determined to know the truth."
The sick man tossed himself restlessly from side to side in his feverish
sleep, changed his position two or three times with evident weariness and
pain, and then opened his eyes and stared with a blank unseeing gaze at
his friend. That look, without one ray of recognition, went to Gilbert's
heart somehow.
"O God, how fond I was of him!" he said to himself. "And if he has been a
traitor! If he were to die like this, before I have wrung the truth from
him--to die, and I not dare to cherish his memory--to be obliged to live
out my life with this doubt of him!"
This doubt! Had he much reason to doubt two minutes afterwards, when
John Saltram raised himself on his gaunt arm, and looked piteously round
the room?
"Marian!" he called. "Marian!"
"Yes," muttered Gilbert, "it is all true. He is calling his wife."
The revelation scarcely seemed a surprise to him. Little by little that
suspicion, so vague and dim at first, had gathered strength, and now that
all his doubts received confirmation from those unconscious lips, it
seemed to him as if he had known his friend's falsehood for a long time.
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