e finger-post only a
little while before Wildfire broke down; so, buttoning his coat,
twisting the lash of his hunting-whip compactly round the handle, and
rapping the tops of his boots with a self-possessed air, as if to
assure 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 reg