"I'll come down and complete the term shortly, Aldean."
"Oh, you don't wish to be here when Miss Bellairs marries Carson, I suppose?"
"Miss Bellairs shall never marry Carson if I can help it."
"Perhaps not, Mallow, but I don't exactly see how you can help it. This morning I saw Carson, and he tells me the ceremony is to take place in a fortnight."
"A great deal can be done in a fortnight, Jim."
"Old man?" questioned Jim, with a stare, "have you anything up your sleeve?"
"What! that old game? You are becoming a maniac on that subject, Mallow. It's all bosh, you know. Carson is Carson, right enough. Mrs. Purcell, Semberry, Mr. Brock,--they've all said as much."
"No doubt," replied Mallow, dryly. "But not one of them has explained why Carson's clothes should be impregnated with sandal-wood as were those of the man in Athelstane Place."
"You'll find nothing there to help you," said Aldean, shaking his head. "What the police couldn't do, you won't."
"Then I shall go to the police themselves."
"You'll look for a needle in a haystack, you mean. However, if you have made up your mind, I suppose you must go on your wild-goose chase. When may I expect you back from it?"
"Does that mean at the end of a fortnight?"
"If I make no discoveries associating Carson with the murder, it does."
"Oh, Lord! do you want to hang the man as well as rob him of his wife?"
"Goodness only knows what you are, Mallow. Well, least said soonest mended; go, and good luck go with you."
After this conversation, in which, it will be noticed, Mallow gave no hint of his interview with Olive, he went to London, and was absent for the greater part of a fortnight.
Olive, too, kept her own counsel about that stormy wooing. But she felt a strange joy in recalling to herself its every detail. It was the joy of a woman who loves to be dominated and to be ruled by the man she adores. Had Mallow cut the Gordian knot of her difficulties, and, in the face of all her objection, forced her to marry him, secretly she would have been pleased and relieved. As it was, he had left her with an enigmatic utterance which she could not understand.
Yet this time of trial was in some ways beneficial to her. It strengthened the better qualities of her nature, which otherwise might have weakened in the sunshine of perpetual good fortune. The ills of this life, like drugs, are unpleasant but necessary. They brace our mental organization as do tonics our physical.