And then, quick as thought, another picture presented itself to him. He thought of the Colonel, with his kind solicitous face, his stoop of attention, and the smile which lighted up his fatherly eyes when he spoke of his boy, whom he should hope to see Roger's brother-in-arms. For the moment he saw before him, not the flaring lights and clumsy figures of this rude company, but the dim inn-parlour, with its poor candles, and the benign old stranger with his paternal smile. The young man could not bear it. He said to himself sternly, "This must not be!" and dismissed the contrast which distracted him from his mind with a violent effort. Then he made his way into the half-lighted railway-station, where everything lay dark and silent, a stray porter making ghostly appearance across the rails, and an abysm of darkness on either side, out of which, and into which, now and then plunged the red-eyed ogre of a passing train. In answer to his inquiries, he found that the night-train to London stopped here to take up passengers in the middle of the night. He made a homely supper in the inn, and then came outside, to the station, to wait for it. There he paced up and down, watching the coming and going of short trains here and there, the hurried clambering up, and the more leisurely descent of rural passengers, upon whom the light fell coldly as they went and came. The roar and rustle with which some one-eyed monster, heard long before seen, came plunging and snorting out of the darkness, and all the rapid, shifting, phantasmagoria, of that new fashion of the picturesque which belongs to modern times. The wind blew chill from the open country, with a shrill and piercing concentration of cold through the narrow bar of the little station. By-and-bye the lights diminished, the noises stilled, nobody was left in the place but himself, a drowsy clerk in the little office, and some porters sleeping on the benches. Roger, for his part, could not sleep; he kept in motion, marching up and down the short, resounding, wooden platform, urged by the midnight cold, and by his thoughts, until his weary vigil was concluded by the arrival of his train. Then he, too, plunged like everybody else into darkness, into the mysterious midnight road, with dark London throbbing and shouting at the end; into life and his fate. CHAPTER VII. On the same day, and in a manner not very dissimilar, Horace Scarsdale left his home.