CHAPTER XXV.
MARY'S RECEPTION.
In the afternoon of the same day, now dreary enough, with the dreariness naturally belonging to the dreariest month of the year, Mary arrived in the city preferred to all cities by those who live in it, but the most uninviting, I should imagine, to a stranger, of all cities on the face of the earth.

Cold seemed to have taken to itself a visible form in the thin, gray fog that filled the huge station from the platform to the glass roof.

The latter had vanished, indistinguishable from sky invisible, and from the brooding darkness, in which the lamps innumerable served only to make spots of thinness.

It was a mist, not a November fog, properly so called; but every breath breathed by every porter, as he ran along by the side of the slowly halting train, was adding to its mass, which seemed to Mary to grow in bulk and density as she gazed.

Her quiet, simple, decided manner at once secured her attention, and she was among the first who had their boxes on cabs and were driving away.
But the drive seemed interminable, and she had grown anxious and again calmed herself many times, before it came to an end.