We left Nigel, whose fortunes we are bound to trace by the engagement
contracted in our title-page, sad and solitary in the mansion of
Trapbois the usurer, having just received a letter instead of a visit
from his friend the Templar, stating reasons why he could not at that
time come to see him in Alsatia. So that it appeared that his
intercourse with the better and more respectable class of society,
was, for the present, entirely cut off. This was a melancholy, and, to
a proud mind like that of Nigel, a degrading reflection.
He went to the window of his apartment, and found the street enveloped
in one of those thick, dingy, yellow-coloured fogs, which often invest
the lower part of London and Westminster. Amid the darkness, dense and
palpable, were seen to wander like phantoms
