She remembered, too, the morning he had left Woodlea through her interference, and mentally saw again his pale, set face as he had told her he would never return. He would return now, and would that girl come with him? Mrs. Temple kept asking herself. For up to the time of the squire's death nothing had been seen or heard at the Hall of John Temple since the morning he quitted it. Mr. Temple had felt naturally offended by his nephew's reticence, but at last, at Mr. Churchill's earnest request, he had written to John Temple's bankers to ask if they could tell him of his nephew's whereabouts. The bankers wrote to inform the squire, in reply, that Mr. John Temple was abroad, and that before leaving England he had taken out a considerable sum of money in letters of credit. They wrote nothing more; they had, in fact, been instructed by John Temple before he left England to give no information if any inquiries were made about him. He had gone away a moody and remorseful man, but Mr. Harrison, the solicitor, knew where to find him, and also some officers of the police force. With these he had left orders, which he believed now to be useless, that should anything ever be heard of the lady who had disappeared from the Grosvenor Hotel on such a date that he was at once to be communicated with. But John Temple believed that May was dead; believed that in a sudden frenzy of grief and shame she had destroyed herself. And many a dark and dismal hour he had stood looking down into the murky river, moodily thinking it was sweeping over the fair head of his young love. It was on one of these miserable occasions that Kathleen Weir had seen him, and a sudden feeling of hate and anger had swept through his heart at the sight of her. And shortly after this encounter he had left England. He felt, in truth, that he could bear the strain no farther; that the terrible haunting memory of the young life he believed he had destroyed would overthrow his reason if he remained any longer on the spot. In the meanwhile Mr. Churchill, in spite of his own secret anxieties, had gone about telling his neighbors that his daughter and her husband, Mr. John Temple, were abroad. There was no one to contradict this, yet somehow the impression got about that everything was not quite right. Perhaps it was the way in which Mrs. Churchill drew in her firm lips when her husband spoke of his daughter. At all events, she never spoke of her, nor did she encourage her stepsons to do so. At first the boys had been overjoyed when they heard of May's marriage, and looked forward to many a happy day at the Hall. But when week after week passed, and May never wrote to them, they could not understand it.