An evening in a hotel is seldom cheerful, and this evening was very forlorn. Mr Yorke did not return, though the hour for which he had ordered dinner was past. The girls sat very dolefully one on each side of the table, and read the books which had been provided for their amusement on board ship. Everything had been so lively on board ship, there had been so much society, so many expedients to make the time pass pleasantly, that they had not required to have recourse to these works. It was very strange and dreadfully disenchanting on their first night in London to be compelled to take to this way of getting through the evening. They expected to have been dining, cheerfully chatting about all their impressions, or, perhaps, though it was the first night, to have been taken to a theatre, and seen Shakespeare, perhaps, on Shakespeare’s native soil. Perhaps if they had attained this object of their desires they might not have found it much more satisfactory--but then that did not occur to their fresh minds. And instead of such delights, to find themselves seated in a common-place room with a lamp which smoked, and two dull novels, and the rain coming down in bucketfuls outside, was as dreary and disappointing a termination to the day as could well be supposed. The solemn waiter came in and laid the cloth, and the girls had to change their places. Grace went to the window and gazed out at the pouring rain and the street lamps twinkling feebly through it. Milly sat down vacantly in a big chair, too far off the lamp to continue her book. “I beg your pardon, Miss,” said the soft-voiced waiter: “will you have the dinner up, or wait till the gentleman comes?” “O, Grace!” said Milly, startled, appealing to her sister. “Of course, we will wait for papa,” said Grace, turning round from the window. When the man went away poor little Milly, overtired and depressed, fell a-crying. “Oh, how strange it is! Oh, how lonely it is!” she cried. “I feel as if there was nobody alive--nobody that knew us.” Grace’s lip twitched and quivered a little too. “How silly!” she said; “this is how you always are--up to the skies one moment, and down to the depths the next. What does it matter if nobody knows us? Two of us can go through the world--with papa.” “But what has become of papa?” said Milly. They did not know what to think. He was not a man to be out at night, nor, though he was so undemonstrative, was he a man to abandon his children to an evening in an inn by themselves. Could anything have happened to him? There flashed across the minds of both recollections of stories they had heard, of sudden disappearances, stories mixed up in a great confusion with the Morgue, of which they remembered the name and the dismal use, without clearly remembering where it was; and of people found in the river, and all kinds of terrible catastrophes. These were so much too terrible, however, that after a while Grace laughed.