After this a long interval passed, which it is needless to describe in detail. Five years is a long time in a life; how much it does! Makes ties and breaks them, gives life and withdraws it, finds you happy and leaves you miserable, builds you up or plucks you down; and at the same time how little it does! Buffets you, caresses you, plays at shuttlecock with you; yet leaves you the same man or woman, unchanged. Most of this time James Beresford had spent in absences, now here, now there; not travels according to the old happy sense, though in a real and matter-of-fact sense they were more travels than those he had made so happily in the honeymooning days. But he did not like to use the word. He called his long voyages absences, nothing more. And they were of a very different kind from those expeditions of old. He avoided the Continent as if pestilence had been there, and would not even cross it to get the mail at Brindisi, but went all the way round from Southampton when he went to the East. He went up the Nile, with a scientific party, observing some phenomena or other. He went to America in the same way. He was not a very good sailor, but he made up his mind to that as the best way of fighting through those lonely years. Once he went as far north as any but real Arctic explorers, with their souls in it, had ever done. Once he tracked the possible path of Russia across the wildest border wastes to the Indian frontier. He went everywhere languidly but persistently, seldom roused, but never discouraged. A man may be very brave outside, though he is not brave within; and weakness is linked to strength in ways beyond our guessing. He went into such wilds once, that they gave him an ‘ovation’ at the Geographical Society’s meeting, not because of any information he had brought them, or anything he had done, but because he had been so far off, where so few people had ever been. And periodically he came back to the Square; he would not leave that familiar house. His wife’s drawing-room was kept just as she had liked it, though no one entered the room: the cook and John the butler, who had married, having the charge of everything. And when Mr. Beresford came back to England, he went home, living downstairs generally, with one of his travelling companions to bear him company. Maxwell and he had dropped apart. They were still by way of being fast friends, and doubtless, had one wanted the other, would still have proved so--last resource of friendship, in which the severed may still hope. But, as nothing happened to either, their relations waxed cold and distant. The doctor had never got clear of the suspicion which had risen in his mind at Mrs. Beresford’s death. It is true that had James Beresford given the poor lady that ‘strong sweet dose’ she once had asked for, Maxwell would have forgiven his friend with all his heart. I do not know, in such a strange case, what the doctor could have done; probably exactly as he