That was all. There was nothing in it to open any fresh fountain in his breast. He folded it up carefully and slowly into its envelope, and put it back into his pocket. Write to her! why should he write? It was not as if he wanted to upbraid her, or to point out any enormity she had done. She had not done anything; and what could he say? The future was so misty before him, and his own heart so languid, that her appeal made no impression upon him. Why should he do it? But he stopped again just before he put the letter in his pocket, and gave another glance at his portmanteau. Should he go, and carry her his answer, and judge once again what was the best for her and for himself? He gave up that fancy when the clock struck eight slowly in his ears. It was too late to go to Fernwood that night; and yet there were hours and hours to pass before he could throw himself on his bed with any chance of sleeping; and he had no business to occupy him, or work to do--and how was this long, slow, silent night to be hastened on its tardy wing? John rose at last, with a kind of desperation, and went out. He had nowhere to go, having sought no acquaintances in Camelford. There was nobody in the place that he cared to see, or indeed would not have gone out of his way to avoid; but the streets were all lit up, and some of them were noisy enough. John wandered through them in the lamp-light with strange thoughts. He seemed to himself like a man who had lost his way in the world. He was like Dante when he stood in the midst of his life and found that he had missed the true path. To go on seemed impossible; and when he would have turned back, how many wild beasts were in the way to withstand him! Was there anybody, he wondered, who could lead him back that long, long roundabout way through Hell and Purgatory and Heaven? With such a question in his mind, he wandered into places such as he had never entered before; he watched the people in the streets, and went after them to their haunts. A strange phantasmagoria seemed to pass before his eyes, of dancers and singers, and stupid crowds gaping and looking on, amid smoke and noise and sordid merrymaking. He heard their rude jests and their talk, and loud harsh peals of laughter; he listened to the songs they were listening to with the rough clamour of applause in which there was no real enjoyment. He followed them mutely--a solitary, keen-eyed spectator--into the places where they danced, and where they drank, and where they listened to those songs, with a strange sense of unreality upon him all the while. They were as unreal as if they had been lords and ladies yawning at a State ball. And then all at once John found himself in a dreary half-lighted room, in the midst of a Wesleyan prayer-meeting, where half-seen people, like ghosts in the halflight, were calling to God to have mercy upon them. He gazed at the prayer-meeting as he did at the music-hall, wondering what all the people meant.