himself that he was not at all taken by surprise, he set off
with the sense that he was undertaking a remarkable feat of
bodily exertion, which somehow, and at some time, he should
be able to dress up and magnify to the admiration of a
select circle at the Rainbow. When a young gentleman like
Dunsey is reduced to so exceptional a mode of locomotion as
walking, a whip in his hand is a desirable corrective to a
too bewildering dreamy sense of unwontedness in his
position; and Dunstan, as he went along through the
gathering mist, was always rapping his whip somewhere. It
was Godfrey's whip, which he had chosen to take without
leave because it had a gold handle; of course no one could
see, when Dunstan held it, that the name _Godfrey Cass_ was
cut in deep letters on that gold handle--they could only see
that it was a very handsome whip. Dunsey was not without
fear that he might meet some acquaintance in whose eyes he
would cut a pitiable figure, for mist is no screen when
people get close to each other; but when he at last found
himself in the well-known Raveloe lanes without having met a
soul, he silently remarked that that was part of his usual
good luck. But now the mist, helped by the evening darkness,
was more of a screen than he desired, for it hid the ruts
into which his feet were liable to slip--hid everything, so
that he had to guide his steps by dragging his whip along
the low bushes in advance of the hedgerow. He must soon, he
thought, be getting near the opening at the Stone-pits: he
should find it out by the break in the hedgerow. He found it
out, however, by another circumstance which he had not
expected--namely, by certain gleams of light, which he
presently guessed to proceed from Silas Marner's cottage.
That cottage and the money hidden within it had been in his
mind continually during his walk, and he had been imagining
ways of cajoling and tempting the weaver to part with the
immediate possession of his money for the sake of receiving
interest. Dunstan felt as if there must be a little
frightening added to the cajolery, for his own arithmetical
convictions were not clear enough to afford him any forcible
demonstration as to the advantages of interest; and as for
security, he regarded it vaguely as a means of ch