And after this we relapsed into silence.
I shall never forget the melancholy and gloom of that day as we sat, my uncle and I, in the darkening room, each occupied with his own thoughts. The non-return of my brother did not afford me the happiness I had expected, for it was counterbalanced by Daphne's exquisite grief, which was a source of real pain to me. Having wished so earnestly that the marriage might not come off, I felt as if I were in some way responsible for my brother's non-appearance.
Next day I took an early train for Dover, with the intention of calling at the strange house, and of questioning its silver-haired occupant, who, I was now inclined to believe, knew more of the mystery than he had cared to reveal. Not till I had reached the Kentish sea-town was it suddenly forced upon me that in my haste and excitement I had forgotten to note the name of the street in which the strange house was situated; nor did I even know which way to turn on leaving the station.
The cranial development known to phrenologists as the bump of locality is not my strong point. For several hours I walked the streets of the town, knocking at the door now of this house and now of that, vainly believing that at last I had discovered what I sought. I lived at the hotel a week, and spent a considerable portion of each day in the streets, and on the pier and cliffs, thinking I might meet the old man taking his walks abroad; but all my endeavors to discover him were attended with failure. The silver-haired old man, the mysterious house, the veiled lady, my brother George—all were gone, and seemed now to have had no more reality than the shadows of a dream. Once they were, now they are not.
I will not weary the reader with an account of the investigations carried on for many weeks by my uncle and myself. It will be sufficient to say that our endeavors to discover the cause of George's flight and to trace his whereabouts were fruitless.
"Heaviness may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning." Daphne's morning, however, was a long time in coming and my uncle proposed to hasten its advent by foreign travel.
"A Continental tour will do her good," he remarked to me. "We will visit France, Spain, Italy. The glitter of foreign cities will perhaps help to remove her grief. You must come with us, Frank; we shall need you. A young fellow like you will be able to enliven and interest her more than any lady companion could do—certainly more than her old father, who is often prosy and dull, I fear. Being her cousin, you can talk to her with a freedom and an ease that in any other young man would be familiarity. And for heaven's sake try to make her forget her grief. Her sad face and thin wasted figure cut me to the heart. You do not mind giving up Heidelberg for a time?"
It would require no great sacrifice on the part of any young man to leave the cloisters of a university in order to escort a beautiful girl through Europe, so I gladly assented to my uncle's proposition, resolving, for my own sake, to try to make Daphne forget her grief. She yielded a willing acquiescence to the project of a Continental tour. Poor girl! She was in so dull and passive a state of mind that if we had proposed a voyage of discovery to the North Pole she would have offered no objection. So, late in March, we left England, and by the end of the summer had signed our names in half the hotel books of Europe.