f course,
it involved no difficulty, the words once uttered; but, when he was
left alone again, he paced the room for a few minutes in flush of
mortification. It had made his headache worse.

The mode of his homeward journey he had easily arranged. His baggage
having been labelled for Twybridge, he himself would book as far as his
money allowed, then proceed on foot for the remaining distance. With
the elevenpence now in his pocket he could purchase a ticket to a
little town called Dent, and by a calculation from the railway tariff
he concluded that from Dent to Twybridge was some five-and-twenty
miles. Well and good. At the rate of four miles an hour it would take
him from half-past eleven to about six o'clock. He could certainly
reach home in time for supper.

At Dent station, ashamed to ask (like a tramp) the way to so remote a
place as Twybridge, he jotted down a list of intervening railway
stoppages, and thus was enabled to support the semblance of one who
strolls on for his pleasure. A small handbag he was obliged to carry,
and the clouded sky made his umbrella a requisite. On he trudged
steadily, for the most part by muddy ways, now through a pleasant
village, now in rural solitude. He had had the precaution, at breakfast
time, to store some pieces of bread in his pocket, and after two or
three hours this resource was welcome. Happily the air and exercise
helped him to get rid of his headache. A burst of sunshine in the
afternoon would have made him reasonably cheerful, but for the wretched
meditations surviving from yesterday.

He pondered frequently on his spasmodic debauch, repeating, as well as
memory permitted, all his absurdities of speech and action. Defiant
self-justification was now far to seek. On the other hand, he perceived
very clearly how easy it would be for him to lapse by degrees of
weakened will into a ruinous dissoluteness. Anything of that kind would
mean, of course, the abandonment of his ambitions. All he had to fight
the world with was his brain; and only by incessant strenuousness in
its exercise had he achieved the moderate prominence declared in
yesterday's ceremony. By birth, by station, he was of no account; if he
chose to sink, no influential voice would deplore his falling off or
remind him of what he owed to himself. Chilvers, now--what a
wide-spreading outcry, what calling upon gods and men, would be excited
by any defection of that brilliant youth! Godwin Peak must make his own