The face he loved, changed, disfigured, awful--the damp clinging hair.
"Holes," replied the chief of the local constabulary, sententiously; "there's holes in that there river where you might hide half a dozen drownded men, and never hope to find 'em, no more than if they was at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Lord bless your heart, sir, you Londoners don't know what a river is, in a manner of speaking," added the man, who was most likely unacquainted with the existence of the Thames, compared with which noble stream this sluggish Hampshire river was the veriest ditch.

"I've known a many poor creatures drownded in that river, and never one of 'em to come to light--not that the river was dragged for _them_.

Their friends weren't of the dragging class, they weren't." The London police were more hopeful and more delusive.

They were always hearing of some young lady newly arrived at some neighbouring town or village who seemed to answer exactly to the description of Mrs.Holbrook.
And, behold, when Gilbert Fenton hurried off post-haste to the village or town, and presented himself before the lady in question, he found for the most part that she was ten years older than Marian, and as utterly unlike her as it was possible for one Englishwoman to be unlike another.
He possessed a portrait of the missing girl--a carefully finished photograph, which had been given to him in the brief happy time when she was his promised wife; and he caused this image to be multiplied and distributed wherever the search for Marian was being made.