There were people in the same compartment with him whom he knew, and who in the intervals of reading the evening papers exchanged remarks with him of that recondite and abstruse nature which railway travellers have made their own; but for once Mr. Asherill felt out of tune with politics, religion, commerce, and the stock exchange.
Something once very real had risen like a ghost before him, and he was not perhaps altogether sorry when, the last of his companions bidding him good evening, he was left to pursue the remainder of his journey in solitude, except for the presence of that phantom shadow which he faced resolutely, retracing step by step the road they two--the trouble and himself--had frantically hurried over together.
Out of the shadows of the past, the events of one day--one wet Saturday, one awful Saturday--showed themselves clear and distinct as a light tracing, against a dark background:--
He beheld day breaking upon him; a man out at elbows as regarded fortune--not for the first time in his life. A great dread had kept him wakeful. He had loathed the blackness of night, and yet when light dawned he had hidden his face from it.
What more?--a mean, poorly-furnished room; a sick woman to whom he carried the best cup of tea and a slice of bread toasted with his own hands, and then sat down to read a letter which took all appetite from him.
Out in the drenching rain, with only an old torn disreputable-looking cotton umbrella between him and the weather--out, with the wet soaking through his poor patched boots--out, his fingers numb with cold, and his heart less numb than paralysed with the same dread a hare feels when, her strength spent, she hears the hounds gaining on her.
From office to office--from one friend--Heaven save the mark!--to another; out again in the weather, with "No" ringing in every possible accent in which the word could be uttered or disguised; out hour after hour--for it was before the Saturday early-closing movement had been thought of--too wretched to feel hunger, too miserable to be exactly conscious of the length and depth of his almost frantic despair; out in the sloppy streets, under the sweeping pelting rain, with every resource exhausted, with ruin and worse than ruin staring him in the face.