Now his being was concentrated in the eyes as a landscape is sometimes in a piece of sky.  He read:  “She told me that she had been once to see her lover in the Temple.”  It was then Lily.  He turned to Mrs. Byril’s first letter, and saw Lily in every line of the description.  Should he go to her?  Of course ...  When?  At once!  Should it not prove to be Lily? ...  He did not care ...  He must go, and in half an hour he touched the swiftly trotting mare with the whip and glanced at his watch.  “I shall just do it.”  The hedges passed behind, and the wintry prospects were unfolded and folded away.  But as he approached the station, a rumble and then a rattle came out of the valley, and though he lashed the mare into a gallop, he arrived only in time to see a vanishing cloud of steam.

The next train did not reach London till long after the mail had left Charing Cross.

It froze hard during the night, and next morning his feet chilled in his thin shoes, as he walked to and fro, seeking a carriage holding a conversational-looking person.  At Dover the wind was hard as the ice-bound steps which he descended, and the sea rolled in dolefully about the tall cliffs, melting far away into the bleak grayness of the sky.  But more doleful than the bleak sea was sullen Picardy.  Mike could not sleep, and his eyes fed upon the bleak black of swampy plains, utterly mournful, strangely different from green and gladsome England.  And two margins of this doleful land remained impressed upon his mind; the first, a low grange, discoloured, crouching on the plain, and curtained by seven lamentable poplars, and Mike thought of the human beings that came from it, to see only a void landscape, and to labour in bleak fields.  He remembered also a marsh with osier-beds and pools of water; and in the largest of these there was a black and broken boat.  Thin sterile hills stretched their starved forms in the distance, and in the raw wintry light this landscape seemed like a page of the primitive world, and the strange creature striving with an oar recalled our ancestors.

Paris was steeped in great darkness and starlight, and the cab made slow and painful way through the frost-bound streets.  The amble and the sliding of the horse was exasperating, the drive unendurable with uncertainty and cold, and Mike hammered his frozen feet on the curving floor of the vehicle.  Street succeeded street, all growing meaner as they neared the Gare de Lyons.  Fearing he should miss the express he called to the impassive driver to hasten the vehicle.  Three minutes remained to take his ticket and choose a carriage, and hoping for sleep and dreams of Lily, he rolled himself up in a rug for which he had paid sixty guineas, and fell asleep.

Ten hours after, he was roused by the guard, and stretching his stiffened limbs, he looked out, and in the vague morning saw towzled and dilapidated travellers, slipping upon the thin ice that covered the platform, striving to reach long, rough tables, spread with coffee, fruit, and wine.  Mike drank some coffee, and thinking of Mrs. Byril’s roses, wondered when they should get into the sunshine.