evening when after a prolonged investigation of affairs, Astley Fenton
put on his hat, and left his cousin's office for ever. When Gilbert heard
of him next, he was clerk to a bookseller in Sydney.

The disentanglement of the Melbourne trading had occupied longer than
Gilbert expected; and his exile had been especially dreary to him during
the last two months he spent in Australia, from the failure of his
English letters. The first two mails after his arrival had brought him
letters from Marian and her uncle, and one short note from John Saltram.
The mails that followed brought him nothing, and he was inexpressibly
alarmed and distressed by this fact. If he could by any possibility have
returned to England immediately after the arrival of the first mail which
brought him no letter, he would have done so. But his journey would have
been wasted had he not remained to complete the work of reorganization he
had commenced; so he stayed, sorely against the grain, hoping to get a
letter by the next mail.

That came, and with the same dispiriting result to Gilbert Fenton. There
was a letter from his sister, it is true; but that was written from
Switzerland, where she was travelling with her husband, and brought him
no tidings of Marian. He tried to convince himself that if there had been
bad news, it must needs have come to him; that the delay was only the
result of accident, some mistake of Marian's as to the date of the mail.
What more natural than that she should make such a mistake, at a place
with such deficient postal arrangements as those which obtained at
Lidford? But, argue with himself as he might, this silence of his
betrothed was none the less perplexing to him, and he was a prey to
perpetual anxiety during the time that elapsed before the sailing of the
vessel that was to convey him back to England.