Newman was very willing to get away from Paris; the brilliant streets he had walked through in his happier hours, and which then seemed to wear a higher brilliancy in honor of his happiness, appeared now to be in the secret of his defeat and to look down upon it in shining mockery.  He would go somewhere; he cared little where; and he made his preparations.  Then, one morning, at haphazard, he drove to the train that would transport him to Boulogne and dispatch him thence to the shores of Britain.  As he rolled along in the train he asked himself what had become of his revenge, and he was able to say that it was provisionally pigeon-holed in a very safe place; it would keep till called for.

He arrived in London in the midst of what is called “the season,” and it seemed to him at first that he might here put himself in the way of being diverted from his heavy-heartedness.  He knew no one in all England, but the spectacle of the mighty metropolis roused him somewhat from his apathy.  Anything that was enormous usually found favor with Newman, and the multitudinous energies and industries of England stirred within him a dull vivacity of contemplation.  It is on record that the weather, at that moment, was of the finest English quality; he took long walks and explored London in every direction; he sat by the hour in Kensington Gardens and beside the adjoining Drive, watching the people and the horses and the carriages; the rosy English beauties, the wonderful English dandies, and the splendid flunkies.  He went to the opera and found it better than in Paris; he went to the theatre and found a surprising charm in listening to dialogue the finest points of which came within the range of his comprehension.  He made several excursions into the country, recommended by the waiter at his hotel, with whom, on this and similar points, he had established confidential relations.  He watched the deer in Windsor Forest and admired the Thames from Richmond Hill; he ate white-bait and brown-bread and butter at Greenwich, and strolled in the grassy shadow of the cathedral of Canterbury.  He also visited the Tower of London and Madame Tussaud’s exhibition.  One day he thought he would go to Sheffield, and then, thinking again, he gave it up.  Why should he go to Sheffield?  He had a feeling that the link which bound him to a possible interest in the manufacture of cutlery was broken.  He had no desire for an “inside view” of any successful enterprise whatever, and he would not have given the smallest sum for the privilege of talking over the details of the most “splendid” business with the shrewdest of overseers.