go to him. I waited till the reply came--it was a
little more favourable--went up to London, and caught a midnight train
for Manchester.

The news had the effect which a sudden shock is apt to have, of inducing
a sense of curious unreality. I neither read nor slept, nor even thought
coherently. I was just aware of disaster and fear. I was alone in my
compartment. Sometimes we passed through great, silent, deserted
stations, or stopped outside a junction for an express to pass. At one
or two places there was a crowd of people, seeing off a party of
soldiers, with songs and cheers. Further north I was aware at one time
that the train was labouring up a long incline, and I had a faint sense
of relief when suddenly the strain relaxed, and the train began to run
swiftly and smoothly downwards; I had just one thought, the desire to
reach my brother, and over and over again the dread of what I might
hear.

It was still dark and chilly when I arrived at Manchester. The great
station was nearly empty. I drove hurriedly through dimly-lit streets.
Sometimes great factories towered up, or dark house-fronts shuttered
close. Here there were high steel networks of viaducts overhead, or
parapets of bridges over hidden waterways. At last I came to where a
great church towered up, and an iron-studded door in a blank wall
appeared. I was told this was the place, and pushing it open I went up a
stone-flagged path, among beds of soot-stained shrubs, to where a
lantern shone in the porch of a sombre house. There was a window high up
on the left, where a shaded lamp was burning and a fire flickered on the
ceiling, and I knew instinctively that this was my brother's room. I
rang, and presently a weary-eyed, kindly priest, in a hastily-donned
cassock, appeared. He said at once that my brother was a little better
and was asleep. The doctors were to see him at nine. I asked where I
could go, and he advised a hotel hard by. "We did not expect you," he
said, "or we would have had a room ready, but now I fear we could hardly
make you comfortable."

I went to the hotel, a big, well-equipped place, and was taken to a
bedroom, where I slept profoundly, out of utter weariness. Then I went
down to the Bishop's House again at nine o'clock. By daylight Manchester
had a grim and sinister air. It was raining softly and the air was heavy
with smoke. The Bishop's House stood in what was evidently a poor
quarter, full of mean houses and factories, all of re