"Not a word. Lord Saltire and General Mainwaring are both with my father, in London. Grandma won't see either me or Adelaide. Do you know that she has been moving heaven and earth to find you?"
"Good soul! I won't be found, though. Now, good-night!"
And he went. If any one had told him three months before that he would have been locked in the same room with a man who had done him such irreparable injury, and have left it at the end of half an hour with a quiet "good-night," he would most likely have beaten that man there and then. But he was getting tamed very fast. Ay, he was already getting more than tamed; he was in a fair way to get broken-hearted.
"I will not see her to-night, sir," he said to Hornby, whom he found with his head resting on the table; "I will come to-morrow, and prepare her for leaving this house. You are to see her the day after to-morrow; but without hope, remember."
He roused a groom from above the stable to help him to saddle the horses. "Will it soon be morning?" he asked.
"Morning," said the lad; "it's not twelve o'clock yet. It's a dark night, mate, and no moon. But the nights are short now. The dawn will be on us before we have time to turn in our beds."
He rode slowly home after Hornby. "The night is dark, but the dawn will be upon us before we can turn in our beds!" Only the idle words of a sleepy groom, yet they echoed in his ears all the way home. The night is dark indeed; but it will be darker yet before the dawn, Charles Ravenshoe.