It was a night of extraordinary blackness; you could not distinguish a hedge until the twigs stung across your face; the road was narrow, great tree-trunks with bulging roots lined it, at times it was very steep—­and, besides and beyond every other discomfort, there was the rain.  It fell pitilessly straight over the face of the country with a continuous roar as though the earth was a hollow drum.  Both travellers were drenched to the skin before they were free of Saxmundham, and one of them, when after midnight they stumbled into the poor tumble-down parody of a tavern at Glemham, was in an extreme exhaustion.  It was no more than an ague, said Lance, from which he periodically suffered, but the two men slept in the same bare room, and towards morning Mitchelbourne was awakened from a deep slumber by an unfamiliar voice talking at an incredible speed through the darkness in an uncouth tongue.  He started up upon his elbow; the voice came from Lance’s bed.  He struck a light.  Lance was in a high fever, which increased as the morning grew.

Now, whether he had the sickness latent within him when he came from Barbary, or whether his anxieties and corpulent habit made him an easy victim to disease, neither the doctor nor any one else could determine.  But at twelve o’clock that day Lance was seized with an attack of cholera and by three in the afternoon he was dead.  The suddenness of the catastrophe shocked Mr. Mitchelbourne inexpressibly.  He stood gazing at the still features of the man whom fear had, during these last days, so grievously tormented, and was solemnly aware of the vanity of those fears.  He could not pretend to any great esteem for his companion, but he made many suitable reflections upon the shears of the Fates and the tenacity of life, in which melancholy occupation he was interrupted by the doctor, who pointed out the necessity of immediate burial.  Seven o’clock the next morning was the hour agreed upon, and Mitchelbourne at once searched in Lance’s coat pockets for the letters which he carried.  There were only two, superscribed respectively to Mrs. Ufford at “The Porch” near Glemham, and to her daughter Brasilia.  At “The Porch” Mitchelbourne remembered Lance was expected this very evening, and he thought it right at once to ride thither with his gloomy news.

Having, therefore, sprinkled the letters plentifully with vinegar and taken such rough precautions as were possible to remove the taint of infection from the letters, he started about four o’clock.  The evening was most melancholy.  For, though no rain any longer fell, there was a continual pattering of drops from the trees and a ghostly creaking of branches in a light and almost imperceptible wind.  The day, too, was falling, the grey overhang of cloud was changing to black, except for one wide space in the west, where a pale spectral light shone without radiance; and the last of that was fading when he pulled up at a parting of the roads and inquired of a man