This was the champagne in Temple.  In me it did not bubble to speech, and I soon drew him on at a pace that rendered conversation impossible.  Uberly shouted after us to spare the horses’ legs.  We heard him twice out of the deepening fog.  I called to Temple that he was right, we should do it.  Temple hurrahed rather breathlessly.  At the end of an hour I pulled up at an inn, where I left the horses to be groomed and fed, and walked away rapidly as if I knew the town, Temple following me with perfect confidence, and, indeed, I had no intention to deceive him.  We entered a new station of a railway.

‘Oh!’ said Temple, ‘the rest of the way by rail.’

When the railway clerk asked me what place I wanted tickets for, London sprang to my mouth promptly in a murmur, and taking the tickets I replied to Temple,

‘The rest of the way by rail.  Uberly’s sure to stop at that inn’; but my heart beat as the carriages slid away with us; an affectionate commiseration for Temple touched me when I heard him count on our being back at Riversley in time to dress for dinner.

He laughed aloud at the idea of our plumping down on Rippenger’s school, getting a holiday for the boys, tipping them, and then off with Julia, exactly like two Gods of the Mythology, Apollo and Mercury.

‘I often used to think they had the jolliest lives that ever were lived,’ he said, and trying to catch glimpses of the country, and musing, and singing, he continued to feel like one of those blissful Gods until wonder at the passage of time supervened.  Amazement, when he looked at my watch, struck him dumb.  Ten minutes later we were in yellow fog, then in brown.  Temple stared at both windows and at me; he jumped from his seat and fell on it, muttering, ‘No; nonsense!  I say!’ but he had accurately recognized London’s fog.  I left him unanswered to bring up all his senses, which the railway had outstripped, for the contemplation of this fact, that we two were in the city of London.

CHAPTER XI

THE GREAT FOG AND THE FIRE AT MIDNIGHT

It was London city, and the Bench was the kernel of it to me.  I throbbed with excitement, though I sat looking out of the windows into the subterranean atmosphere quite still and firm.  When you think long undividedly of a single object it gathers light, and when you draw near it in person the strange thing to your mind is the absence of that light; but I, approaching it in this dense fog, seemed to myself to be only thinking of it a little more warmly than usual, and instead of fading it reversed the process, and became, from light, luminous.  Not being able, however, to imagine the Bench a happy place, I corrected the excess of brightness and gave its walls a pine-torch glow; I set them in the middle of a great square, and hung the standard of England drooping over them in a sort of mournful family pride.  Then, because