and only ceased to feel like the Nietzschean Over-man,
when I saw the train running out of the station.

Even then I did not lose my head. It occurred to me almost at once
that, in the event of a prompt pursuit, there would be a great
advantage in not taking a train from Clayton; that, indeed, to have
done so would have been an error from which only luck had saved
me. As it was, I had already been very indiscreet in my inquiries
about Shaphambury; for once on the scent the clerk could not fail
to remember me. Now the chances were against his coming into the
case. I did not go into the station therefore at all, I made no
demonstration of having missed the train, but walked quietly past,
down the road, crossed the iron footbridge, and took the way back
circuitously by White's brickfields and the allotments to the way
over Clayton Crest to Two-Mile Stone, where I calculated I should
have an ample margin for the 6.13 train.

I was not very greatly excited or alarmed then. Suppose, I reasoned,
that by some accident the curate goes to that drawer at once: will
he be certain to miss four out of ten or eleven sovereigns? If he
does, will he at once think I have taken them? If he does, will
he act at once or wait for my return? If he acts at once, will he
talk to my mother or call in the police? Then there are a dozen
roads and even railways out of the Clayton region, how is he to
know which I have taken? Suppose he goes straight at once to the
right station, they will not remember my departure for the simple
reason that I didn't depart. But they may remember about Shaphambury?
It was unlikely.

I resolved not to go directly to Shaphambury from Birmingham, but
to go thence to Monkshampton, thence to Wyvern, and then come down
on Shaphambury from the north. That might involve a night at some
intermediate stopping-place but it would effectually conceal me
from any but the most persistent pursuit. And this was not a case
of murder yet, but only the theft of four sovereigns.

I had argued away all anxiety before I reached Clayton Crest.

At the Crest I looked back. What a world it was! And suddenly it
came to me that I was looking at this world for the last time. If
I overtook the fugitives and succeeded, I should die with them--or
hang. I stopped and looked back more attentively at that wide ugly
valley.

It was my native valley, and I was going out of it, I thought never
to return, and yet in that last prospect, the group