"London, November 19th.—I am alone again in the Great City; alone, for the first time since our marriage. Nearly a week since I started on my homeward journey, leaving Midwinter behind me at Turin.
"The days have been so full of events since the month began, and
I have been so harassed, in mind and body both, for the greater
part of the time, that my Diary has been wretchedly neglected. A
few notes, written in such hurry and confusion that I can hardly
understand them myself, are all that I possess to remind me of
what has happened since the night when Armadale's yacht left
Naples. Let me try if I can set this right without more loss or
time; let me try if I can recall the circumstances in their order
as they have followed each other from the beginning of the month.
"On the 3d of November—being then still at Naples—Midwinter
received a hurried letter from Armadale, date 'Messina.' 'The
weather,' he said, 'had been lovely, and the yacht had made one
of the quickest passages on record. The crew were rather a rough
set to look at; but Captain Manuel and his English mate' (the
latter described as 'the best of good fellows') 'managed them
admirably.' After this prosperous beginning, Armadale had
arranged, as a matter of course, to prolong the cruise; and, at the sailing-master's suggestion, he had decided to visit some of the ports in the Adriatic, which the captain had described as full of character, and well worth seeing.
"A postscript followed, explaining that Armadale had written in
a hurry to catch the steamer to Naples, and that he had opened
his letter again, before sending it off, to add something that he
had forgotten. On the day before the yacht sailed, he had been
at the banker's to get 'a few hundreds in gold,' and he believed
he had left his cigar-case there. It was an old friend of his, and he begged that Midwinter would oblige him by endeavoring recover it, and keeping it for him till they met again.
"That was the substance of the letter.
"I thought over it carefully when Midwinter had left me alone
again, after reading it. My idea was then (and is still) that Manuel had not persuaded Armadale to cruise in a sea like the Adriatic, so much less frequented by ships than the Mediterranean, for nothing. The terms, too, in which the trifling loss of the cigar-case was mentioned struck me as being equally suggestive of what was coming. I concluded that Armadale's circular notes had not been transformed into those 'few hundreds in gold' through any forethought or business knowledge of his own. Manuel's influence, I suspected, had been exerted in this matter also, and once more not without reason. At intervals through the wakeful night these considerations came back again and again to me; and time after time they pointed obstinately (so far as my next movements were concerned) in one and the same way—the way back to England.
"How to get there, and especially how to get there unaccompanied
by Midwinter, was more than I had wit enough to discover that
night. I tried and tried to meet the difficulty, and fell asleep
exhausted toward the morning without having met it.
"Some hours later, as soon as I was dressed, Midwinter came in, with news received by that morning's post from his employers in London. The proprietors of the newspaper had received from the editor so favorable a report of his correspondence from Naples that they had determined on advancing him to a place of greater responsibility and greater emolument at Turin. His instructions were inclosed in the letter, and he was requested to lose no time in leaving Naples for his new post.
"On hearing this, I relieved his mind, before he could put the
question, of all anxiety about my willingness to remove. Turin
had the great attraction, in my eyes, of being on the road to
England. I assured him at once that I was ready to travel as soon
as he pleased.