Two pair of jealous eyes kept constant watch upon Eleanor Monckton for some time after that October afternoon on which the lawyer and Miss Mason stood side by side, looking at the two figures by the sundial. Gilbert Monckton was too proud to complain. He laid down the fair hopes of his manhood in the grave that already held the broken dreams of his youth. He bowed his head and resigned himself to his fate. “I was mistaken,” he thought; “it was too preposterous to suppose that at forty I could win the love of a girl of eighteen. My wife is good and true, but——” But what? Could this girl be good and true? Had she not deceived her lover most cruelly, most deliberately, in her declaration of utter indifference towards Launcelot Darrell. Mr. Monckton remembered her very words, her sudden look of astonishment, her almost shuddering gesture of surprise, as he asked the important question, “And you do not love Launcelot Darrell?” “Love him! oh, no, no, no!” And in spite of this emphatic denial, Mrs. Monckton had, ever since her arrival at Tolldale Priory, betrayed an intense, an almost feverish interest in the young scapegrace artist. “If she is capable of falsehood,” thought the lawyer, “there must surely be no truth upon this earth. Shall I trust her and wait patiently for the solution of the mystery? No; between man and wife there should be no mystery! She has no right to keep any secret from me.” So Mr. Monckton hardened his heart against his beautiful young wife, and set himself sternly and indefatigably to watch her every look, to listen to every intonation of her voice, to keep a rigorous guard over his own honour and dignity. Poor Eleanor was too innocent to read all these signs aright; she only thought that her husband was changed; that this stern and gloomy companion was not the same Gilbert Monckton whom she had known at Hazlewood; not the patient “guide, philosopher, and friend,” whose subdued bass voice, eloquent in the dusky evenings long ago—a year is very long to a girl of eighteen—in Mrs. Darrell’s simple drawing-room, had seemed a kind of intellectual music to her. Had she not been absorbed always by that one thought, whose intensity had reduced the compass of her mind to a monotone, the young wife would very bitterly have felt this change in her husband. As it was she looked upon her disappointment as something very far away from her; something to be considered and regretted by-and-by; by-and-by, when the grand business of her life was done. But while the gulf between the young wife and her husband every day grew wider, this grand business made no progress. Day after day, week after week passed by, and Eleanor Monckton found herself no nearer the end.