any lightening of the opaque vault overhead to mark its meridian, there came at times a thinning of the gray wall on either side of the track, showing the vague bulk of a distant hill, the battlemented sky line of an old-time hall, or the spires of a cathedral, but always melting back into the mist again as in a dream.  Then vague stretches of gloom again, foggy stations obscured by nebulous light and blurred and moving figures, and the black relief of a tunnel.  Only once the captain, catching sight of Randolph’s awed face under the lamp of the smoking carriage, gave way to his long, low laugh.  “Jolly place, England—­so very ‘Merrie.’” And then they came to a comparatively lighter, broader, and more brilliantly signaled tunnel filled with people, and as they remained in it, Randolph was told it was London.  With the sensation of being only half awake, he was guided and put into a cab by his companion, and seemed to be completely roused only at the hotel.

It had been arranged that Randolph should first go down to Chillingworth rectory and call on Miss Eversleigh, and, without disclosing his secret, gather the latest news from Dornton Hall, only a few miles from Chillingworth.  For this purpose he had telegraphed to her that evening, and had received a cordial response.  The next morning he arose early, and, in spite of the gloom, in the glow of his youthful optimism entered the bedroom of the sleeping Captain Dornton, and shook him by the shoulder in lieu of the accolade, saying:  “Rise, Sir John Dornton!”

The captain, a light sleeper, awoke quickly.  “Thank you, my lad, all the same, though I don’t know that I’m quite ready yet to tumble up to that kind of piping.  There’s a rotten old saying in the family that only once in a hundred years the eldest son succeeds.  That’s why Bill was so cocksure, I reckon.  Well?”

“In an hour I’m off to Chillingworth to begin the campaign,” said Randolph cheerily.

“Luck to you, my boy, whatever happens.  Clap a stopper on your jaws, though, now and then.  I’m glad you like Sybby, but I don’t want you to like her so much as to forget yourself and give me away.”

Half an hour out of London the fog grew thinner, breaking into lace-like shreds in the woods as the train sped by, or expanding into lustrous tenuity above him.  Although the trees were leafless, there was some recompense in the glimpses their bare boughs afforded of clustering chimneys and gables nestling in ivy.  An infinite repose had been laid upon the landscape with the withdrawal of the fog, as of a veil lifted from the face of a sleeper.  All his boyish dreams of the mother country came back to him in the books he had read, and re-peopled the vast silence.  Even the rotting leaves that lay thick in the crypt-like woods seemed to him the dead laurels of its past heroes and sages.  Quaint old-time villages, thatched roofs, the ever-recurring square towers of church or hall, the trim, ordered