Mrs.Bolton had always regarded him as a guilty man,--though guilty of she knew not what.

She had always predicted misery from a marriage so distasteful to her; and her husband, though he had been brought to oppose her and to sanction the marriage, had, from the moment in which the sanction was given, been induced by her influence to reject it.

Robert Bolton, when the charge was first made, when the letter from the woman was first shown to him, had become aware that he had made a mistake in allowing this trouble to come upon the family; and then, as from point to point the evidence had been opened out to him, he had gradually convinced himself that the son-in-law and brother-in-law, whom he had, as it were, forced into the family, was a bigamist.

There was present to them all an intense desire to prove the man's guilt, which was startling to all around who heard anything of the matter.

Up to this time the Bolton telegrams and the Caldigate telegrams had elicited two facts,--that Allan the Wesleyan minister had gone to the Fiji Islands and had there died, and that they at Nobble who had last known Dick Shand's address, now knew it no longer.