With the departure of my summer visitors, a gloom fell upon us all at Larkhall. Mrs. Ellmer missed her admirers and grew petulant; Babiole had discovered some new haunt and was never to be found; while I felt the wanderer's fever growing strong upon me again. Fabian Scott had cleared up the little mystery concerning the husband and father of my tenants. It appeared that Mr. Ellmer, while neglecting and ill-using his wife without scruple when she was under the same roof with him, was subject to strong fits of conjugal devotion when two or three months of hard work, away from him, gave him reason to think that she would be in possession of a few pounds of carefully-gleaned savings, while he, her lawful and once adored husband, did not know where to turn for a glass of beer. During the winter before I found them in Aberdeen some friends with whom both mother and child had taken refuge from his drunken fury had had to pay him a heavy ransom for their kindness, besides exposing themselves to the inconvenience of having their house mobbed and their windows broken whenever the tender husband and father, having exhausted the tribute paid to keep him in the public-house, bethought himself of this new way of calling attention to his wrongs. Fabian told me that a few weeks back he had been accosted in the Strand by Mr. Ellmer, who was looking more tattered and dissipated than ever. This gentleman had experienced great concern at the total disappearance of his wife, had asked Fabian's advice as to the best means of finding her, and had finally let out his conviction that she was 'doing well for herself,' in a tone of bitter indignation. Fabian had said nothing of this meeting to Mrs. Ellmer, being, both for her sake and for mine, anxious not to touch those strings of sentiment which, in the better kind of women, sound so readily for the most good-for-nothing of husbands. Already Mrs. Ellmer had begun to allude with irritating frequency to the talents and noble qualities of her 'poor husband,' whom it was the fashion among us all to consider as the 'victim of art,' as if art had been a chronic disease. This fiction had gone on expanding and developing until the illustrious artist, to whom absence was so becoming, had eclipsed the entire Royal Academy, and had become to his wife a source of legitimate pride which, if touching by its naivete, was also wearisome by its excess.