a cab by his
companion, and seemed to be completely roused only at the hotel.

It had been arranged that Randolph should first go down to Chillingworth
rectory and call on Miss Eversleigh, and, without disclosing his
secret, gather the latest news from Dornton Hall, only a few miles from
Chillingworth. For this purpose he had telegraphed to her that evening,
and had received a cordial response. The next morning he arose early,
and, in spite of the gloom, in the glow of his youthful optimism entered
the bedroom of the sleeping Captain Dornton, and shook him by the
shoulder in lieu of the accolade, saying: "Rise, Sir John Dornton!"

The captain, a light sleeper, awoke quickly. "Thank you, my lad, all the
same, though I don't know that I'm quite ready yet to tumble up to that
kind of piping. There's a rotten old saying in the family that only
once in a hundred years the eldest son succeeds. That's why Bill was so
cocksure, I reckon. Well?"

"In an hour I'm off to Chillingworth to begin the campaign," said
Randolph cheerily.

"Luck to you, my boy, whatever happens. Clap a stopper on your jaws,
though, now and then. I'm glad you like Sybby, but I don't want you to
like her so much as to forget yourself and give me away."

Half an hour out of London the fog grew thinner, breaking into lace-like
shreds in the woods as the train sped by, or expanding into lustrous
tenuity above him. Although the trees were leafless, there was some
recompense in the glimpses their bare boughs afforded of clustering
chimneys and gables nestling in ivy. An infinite repose had been laid
upon the landscape with the withdrawal of the fog, as of a veil lifted
from the face of a sleeper. All his boyish dreams of the mother country
came back to him in the books he had read, and re-peopled the vast
silence. Even the rotting leaves that lay thick in the crypt-like woods
seemed to him the dead laurels of its past heroes and sages. Quaint
old-time villages, thatched roofs, the ever-recurring square towers of
church or hall, the trim, ordered parks, tiny streams crossed by heavy
stone bridges much too large for them--all these were only pages of
those books whose leaves he seemed to be turning over. Two hours of this
fancy, and then the train stopped at a station within a mile or two of
a bleak headland, a beacon, and the gray wash of a pewter-colored sea,
where a hilly village street climbed to a Norman church tower and the
ivied gables of a rectory