"News which I heard quite by accident this morning obliges me to leave town very suddenly. I am unable to say good-bye. In fact, I haven't time to write even a reasonably long letter; for the train I go by to the east leaves very soon, and I have to pack a portmanteau and get to the station in a very short time. I am not sure how long I shall be away; a few days, anyway. I hope my darling girl will take great care of herself until I get back, for her own ever fond
"Charlie."
Three days passed, and she heard no more of him than of the dead. What had happened to him--to her darling, darling Charlie? She knew him too well to think he could write and would not. She knew him too well to think he had deserted her for some other woman. What had happened to her darling Charlie? When, hour after hour, she heard the postman knock in the street, and yet no tidings came to her of him, she began to think the postman must have been bribed to suppress his letters.
Only two men suspected whither Cheyne had gone, and they waited in fear and trembling of some terrible catastrophe; and at last news was at hand, filling the whole country with his name.
From the day Charles Augustus Cheyne set out for the east coast of England his name never appeared to another story or on the title page of another book.
CHAPTER XI.
[AT BANKLEIGH.]
When Cheyne had packed his portmanteau he took it and a hatbox down the steep staircase, carrying at the same time his letters in his teeth. He wore a low-crowned soft hat, instead of his ordinary silk one. He jumped into the street, and having thrust his letters into a pillar-post, hailed the first empty hansom and drove away to the railway-station.
Either his watch must have been slow or he must have looked at the wrong line of figures in the time-table, for when he got to the station they told him the train was on the point of starting, instead of having, as he had calculated, a good ten minutes to spare.
He took a first-class single ticket to Bankleigh, the nearest railway-station to Silver Bay. Then, with his portmanteau in one hand and his hatbox in the other, he dashed along the way leading to the platform from which the train for Bankleigh starts. The door was shut against him. The train had not yet started, but the time was up. The next train did not go till evening, which meant getting into a small unknown town long past midnight, a thing no one cares to do, particularly when he does not know even the name of a hotel or the hotel in it.