The train was delayed considerably by the adverse weather, and it was not till past seven o'clock that we entered Charing Cross Station. I opened the carriage-door, and, emerging first, assisted the veiled lady to alight. Two points were noticeable in her behaviour while stepping from the train--the care with which she guarded the bag, and the care she took to avert her face from me. As there was not a soul on the platform to welcome her, I was on the point of proffering my services to escort her to her destination, but with a friendly nod to me she flitted off without a moment's delay to the end of the station, and then hailing a cab, was driven off. And it seemed to me that, instead of handing the driver a card with an address on it, as a dumb lady might naturally be supposed to do, she had conveyed her orders to him by word of mouth; but I was too far off to be certain of this. However, the moment the vehicle had disappeared beneath the archway I flung my portmanteau and person into a hansom, calling out to the driver: "Follow the cab that has just left. Don't lose sight of it for a moment. Don't get in front, but keep behind it. I want to see where the lady gets out. You understand?" The man nodded with a grin and a mystical remark about being "up to snuff," then he touched his horse's flank lightly with the whip, and we bowled out of the station in gallant style, following in the wake of the cab. London lay beneath the murky gaslights wrapped in a winding-sheet of snow, not sufficiently deep, however, to stop vehicular traffic, though it retarded it to a considerable extent. The snow was an advantage in one respect, since it deadened the sound of the wheels of my hansom, and the wintry flakes still falling served as a sort of veil to conceal the fact that the cab was being followed. The destination of the veiled lady appeared to be some place in North London, for the vehicle she was in proceeded along St. Martin's Lane, and turned up Long Acre into Drury Lane. Thence its progress was across Oxford Street, and up Southampton Row, till it finally turned into the Euston Road. "I have it!" I cried. "She is going to Euston Station!" All hope of tracing the mysterious lady to her final destination must now be abandoned. If she were going by train to some distant part of the country it was out of the question to follow her. I must be at the wedding. But I was wrong in my hasty surmise. The cab did not proceed to the station, but turned to the left along the Euston Road, stopping at last in front of an obscure public-house; and the cabman, flinging down the reins, descended from the box and entered the building.