The fog deepened as they reached the station, and, as it seemed to Randolph, made their parting still more vague and indefinite, and it was with difficulty that he could respond to the young girl’s frank hope that he would soon return to them.  Yet he half resolved that he would not until he could tell her all.

Nevertheless, as the train crept more and more slowly, with halting signals, toward London, he buoyed himself up with the hope that Captain Dornton would still try conclusions for his patrimony, or at least come to some compromise by which he might be restored to his rank and name.  But upon these hopes the vision of that great house settled firmly upon its lands, held there in perpetuity by the dead and stretched-out hands of those that lay beneath its soil, always obtruded itself.  Then the fog deepened, and the crawling train came to a dead stop at the next station.  The whole line was blocked.  Four precious hours were hopelessly lost.

Yet despite his impatience, he reentered London with the same dazed semi-consciousness of feeling as on the night he had first arrived.  There seemed to have been no interim; his visit to the rectory and Hall, and even his fateful news, were only a dream.  He drove through the same shadow to the hotel, was received by the same halo-encircled lights that had never been put out.  After glancing through the halls and reading room he hurriedly made his way to his companion’s room.  The captain was not there.  He quickly summoned the waiter.  The gentleman?  Yes; Captain Dornton had left with his servant, Redhill, a few hours after Mr. Trent went away.  He had left no message.

Again condemned to wait in inactivity, Randolph tried to resist a certain uneasiness that was creeping over him, by attributing the captain’s absence to some unexpected legal consultation or the gathering of evidence, his prolonged detention being due to the same fog that had delayed his own train.  But he was somewhat surprised to find that the captain had ordered his luggage into the porter’s care in the hall below before leaving, and that nothing remained in his room but a few toilet articles and the fateful portmanteau.  The hours passed slowly.  Owing to that perpetual twilight in which he had passed the day, there seemed no perceptible flight of time, and at eleven o’clock, the captain not arriving, he determined to wait in the latter’s room so as to be sure not to miss him.  Twelve o’clock boomed from an adjacent invisible steeple, but still he came not.  Overcome by the fatigue and excitement of the day, Randolph concluded to lie down in his clothes on the captain’s bed, not without a superstitious and uncomfortable recollection of that night, about a year before, when he had awaited him vainly at the San Francisco hotel.  Even the fateful portmanteau was there to assist his gloomy fancy.  Nevertheless, with the boom of one o’clock in his drowsy ears as his last coherent recollection, he sank into a dreamless sleep.