him that he is nearing his goal,
and by degrees the dull rumble becomes a clanking roar as the expresses
rush headlong by. On a crisp winter day they leave behind them a trail
of whitest wool, and in the night-time a fiery serpent follows them when
the open furnace-door flings on the cloud a splendid radiance. But in
the dead heats of midsummer the sun dries up the steam, and they speed
along, the more wonderful because there is no trace to tell what power
it is that drives them.

Of all these things Westray saw nothing. A soft white fog had fallen
upon everything. It drifted by in delicate whirling wreaths, that
seemed to have an innate motion of their own where all had been still
but a minute before. It covered his clothes with a film of the finest
powdery moisture that ran at a touch into heavy drops, it hung in
dripping dew on his moustache, and hair, and eyebrows, it blinded him,
and made him catch his breath. It had come rolling in from the sea as
on that night when Mr Sharnall was taken, and Westray could hear the
distant groaning of fog-horns in the Channel; and looking backwards
towards Cullerne, knew from a blurred glare, now green, now red, that a
vessel in the offing was signalling for a coastwise pilot. He plodded
steadily forward, stopping now and then when he found his feet on the
grass sward to recover the road, and rejoicing when one of the white
posts assured him that he was still keeping the right direction. The
blinding fog isolated him in a strange manner; it cut him off from
Nature, for he could see nothing of her; it cut him off from man, for he
could not have seen even a legion of soldiers had they surrounded him.
This removal of outside influences threw him back upon himself, and
delivered him to introspection; he began for the hundredth time to weigh
his position, to consider whether the momentous step that he was taking
was necessary to his ease of mind, was right, was prudent.

To make a proposal of marriage is a matter that may give the
strongest-minded pause, and Westray's mind was not of the strongest. He
was clever, imaginative, obstinate, scrupulous to a fault; but had not
that broad outlook on life which comes of experience, nor the power and
resolution to readily take a decision under difficult circumstances, and
to abide by it once taken. So it was that reason made a shuttlecock of
his present resolve, and half a dozen times he stopped in the road
meaning to abandon his pur