Chapter XXXIII. Time Flies

Eighteen months passed away in England, and nothing more was heard of the two fugitives to Africa. Lady Emily's cup was very full indeed. On the self-same day she learned of her husband's death and her son's mysterious and unaccountable disappearance. From that moment forth, he was to her as if dead. After Granville left, no letter or news of him, direct or indirect, ever reached Tilgate. It was all most inexplicable. He had disappeared into space, and no man knew of him.

Cyril, too, had now almost given up hoping for news of Guy. Slowly the conviction forced itself deeper and still deeper upon his mind, in spite of Elma, that Guy was really Montague Nevitt's murderer. Else how account for Guy's sudden disappearance, and for the fact that he never even wrote home his whereabouts? Nay, Guy's letter itself left no doubt upon his mind. Cyril went through life now oppressed continually with the terrible burden of being a murderer's brother.

And indeed everybody else--except Elma Clifford--implicitly shared that opinion with him. Cyril was sure the unknown benefactor shared it too, for Guy's six thousand pounds were never paid in to his credit--as indeed how could they, since Colonel Kelmscott, who had promised to pay them, died before receiving the balance of the purchase money for the Dowlands estate? Cyril slank through the world, then, weighed down by his shame, for Guy and he were each other's doubles, and he always had a deep underlying conviction that, as Guy was in any particular, so also in the very fibre of his nature he himself was.

Everybody else, except Elma Clifford; but in spite of all, Elma still held out firm, in her intuitive way, in favour of Guy's innocence. She knew it, she said; and there the matter dropped. And she knew quite equally, in her own firm mind, that Gilbert Gildersleeve was the real murderer.

Gilbert Gildersleeve, meanwhile, had gone up a step or two higher in the social scale. He had been promoted to the bench on the first vacancy, as all the world had long expected; but, strange to say, he took it far more modestly than all the world had ever anticipated. Indeed, before he was made a judge, everybody said he'd be intolerable in the ermine. He was blustering and bullying enough, in all conscience, as a mere Queen's Counsel; but when he came to preside in a court of his own, his insolence would surpass even the wonted insolence of our autocratic British justices. In this, however, everybody was mistaken.

A curious change had of late come over Gilbert Gildersleeve. The big, bullying lawyer was growing nervous and diffident, where of old he had been coarse and self-assertive and blustering. He was beginning at times almost to doubt his own absolute omniscience and absolute wisdom. He was prepared half to admit that under certain circumstances a prisoner might possibly be in the right, and that all crimes alike did not necessarily deserve the hardest sentence the