I sprang into the post-chaise, in which was already seated a French courier, with despatches from his minister; whose attendance the Jew had secured, to lighten the first inconveniences to a young traveller.  The word was given—­we dashed along the Dover road, and I soon gave my last gaze to London, with its fiery haze hanging over it, like the flame of a conflagration.

My mind was still in a whirl as rapid as my wheels.  Hope, doubt, and determination passed through my brain in quick succession, yet there was one thought that came, like Shakspeare’s “delicate spirit,” in all the tumult of soul, of which, like Ariel in the storm, it was the chief cause, to soothe and subdue me.  Hastily as I had driven from the door of my hotel, I had time to cast my eye along the front of Devonshire House.  All the windows of its principal apartments shone with almost noonday brightness—­uniforms glittered, and plumes waved in the momentary view.  But in the range above, all was dark; except one window—­the window of the boudoir—­and there the light was of the dim and melancholy hue that instinctively gives the impression of the sick-chamber.  Was Clotilde still there, feebly counting the hours of pain, while all within her hearing was festivity?  The answers which I had received to my daily enquiries were cheerless.  “She had not quitted the apartment where she had been first conveyed.”—­“The duchess insisted on her not being removed.”—­“Madame was inconsolable, but the doctor had hopes.”  Those, and other commonplaces of information, were all that I could glean from either the complacent chamberlains or the formal physician.  And now I was to give up even this meagre knowledge, and plunge into scenes which might separate us for ever.  But were we not separated already?  If she recovered, must she not be in the power of a task-master?  If she sank under her feebleness, what was earth to me?

In those reveries I passed the hours until daybreak, when the sun and the sea rose together on my wearied eyes.

* * * * *

The bustle of Dover aroused me to a sense of the world.  All was animation on sea and shore.  The emigration was now in full flow, and France was pouring down her terrified thousands on the nearest shore.  The harbour was crowded with vessels of every kind, which had just disgorged themselves of their living cargoes; the streets were blocked up with foreign carriages; the foreign population had completely overpowered the native, and the town swarmed with strangers of every rank and dress, with the hurried look of escaped fugitives.  As I drove to the harbour, my ear rang with foreign accents, and my eyes were filled with foreign physiognomies.  From time to time the band of a regiment, which had furnished a guard to one of the French blood-royal, mingled its drums and trumpets with the swell of sea and shore; and, as I gazed on the moving multitude from my window, the thunder of the guns from the castle, for the arrival of some ambassador, grandly completed the general mass and power of the uproar.