Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon — Read

John Mellish and Talbot Bulstrode walked to and fro upon the lawn before the drawing-room windows on that afternoon on which the detective and his underling lost sight of Stephen Hargraves. It was a dreary time, this period of watching and waiting, of uncertainty and apprehension; and poor John Mellish chafed bitterly under the burden which he had to bear.

Now that his friend's common sense had come to his relief, and that a few plain outspoken sentences had dispersed the terrible cloud of mystery; now that he himself was fully assured of his wife's innocence, he had no patience with the stupid country people who held themselves aloof from the woman he loved. He wanted to go out and do battle for his slandered wife; to hurl back every base suspicion into the faces that had scowled upon his idolized Aurora. How could they dare, these foul-minded slanderers, to harbour one base thought against the purest, the most perfect of women? Mr. Mellish of course quite forgot that he, the rightful defender of all this perfection, had suffered his mind to be for a time obscured beneath the black shadow of that vile suspicion.