But James made no reply to his friend's cheery speech. He went sadly to his room, and sat before the fire pondering. The flames flickered and danced, and sent odd reflections over his face, but the thoughtful, painful gaze never relaxed, the abstraction of the hollow eyes never lessened, and the slow coming dawn of the wintry day found him still there, and still thinking, sadly and painfully. CHAPTER VI. THE RETURN. No time was lost by James Dugdale in acting upon the resolution which had been arrived at by him and his friend. The task of writing to Mr. Baldwin was one of the most painful which it had ever been his lot to fulfil, and as his pen traced the lines destined to carry such dismay, to cause such irremediable grief to his friend, and to the woman whom he had loved so well and so patiently, he thought somewhat bitterly of the strangeness of his fate. Twice he had been destined to traverse Margaret's path in the bright hours of her existence, twice he had been appointed to convey to her words of disappointment, of bitterness, of doom. Life had given him little, he thought, in proportion to that which he had been called upon to suffer. Only one human creature was very precious to him, and he was so little to her that she would never even comprehend the misery he had to suffer, and must still suffer, through her. A general sort of sympathy she would expect from him and recognise, but she would never know that he would cheerfully have borne anything in the shape of suffering that could have been debased, to save her from the knowledge of the facts which his hand was then recording on the paper so soon to meet and blast Fitzwilliam Baldwin's eyes. He had sometimes thought, just before her marriage, that Margaret had divined and partly penetrated his secret; but she did not think of it now, he felt assured, even if she had. All the fulness and beauty of life, all its best and brightest possibilities, had been opened to her, had been given to her in such lavish abundance, that her mind had no room for anything outside its own felicity. Thus James thought; but in thus thinking he did not rightly understand Margaret. Her mind was more capacious, her nature was more stedfast, than he knew, and she had measured the depth and the strength of his love for her more accurately than he guessed, and held it in more dear, grateful, and compassionate remembrance than he would have dared to hope. At the very time when he was writing to her, Margaret, in her sunny Italian home, was thinking and talking of James to her husband and to Lady Davyntry, who had always entertained much regard for Mr. Dugdale of an unintelligible nature, for she admitted readily that she did not understand him. "Nothing could be more acceptable to Gerty's godfather," Margaret was saying, "than a portrait of Gerty--and of me. He shall have the small one we have ordered; and the large one for papa must be begun as soon as we get his answer to my last letter."