Godwin shrank away, and could not resume the conversation thus interrupted.  On the following day he went about with a feeling of guilt.  He avoided the sight of Mr. Rawmarsh, for whom he had suddenly lost all respect, and suffered torments in the thought that he enjoyed an unfair advantage over his class-mates.  The Latin passage happened to be one which he knew thoroughly well; there was no need, even had he desired, to ‘look it up’; but in sitting down to the examination, he experienced a sense of shame and self-rebuke.  So strong were the effects of this, that he voluntarily omitted the answer to a certain important question which he could have ‘done’ better than any of the other boys, thus endeavouring to adjust in his conscience the terms of competition, though in fact no such sacrifice was called for.  He came out at the head of the class, but the triumph had no savour for him, and for many a year he was subject to a flush of mortification whenever this incident came back to his mind.

Mr. Rawmarsh was not the only intelligent man who took an interest in Godwin.  In a house which the boy sometimes visited with a school-fellow, lodged a notable couple named Gunnery the husband about seventy, the wife five years older; they lived on a pension from a railway company.  Mr. Gunnery was a dabbler in many sciences, but had a special enthusiasm for geology.  Two cabinets of stones and fossils gave evidence of his zealous travels about the British isles; he had even written a little hand-book of petrology which was for sale at certain booksellers’ in Twybridge, and probably nowhere else.  To him, about this time, Godwin began to resort, always sure of a welcome; and in the little uncarpeted room where Mr. Gunnery pursued his investigations many a fateful lesson was given and received.  The teacher understood the intelligence he had to deal with, and was delighted to convey, by the mode of suggested inference, sundry results of knowledge which it perhaps would not have been prudent to declare in plain, popular words.

Their intercourse was not invariably placid.  The geologist had an irritable temper, and in certain states of the atmosphere his rheumatic twinges made it advisable to shun argument with him.  Godwin, moreover, was distinguished by an instability of mood peculiarly trying to an old man’s testy humour.  Of a sudden, to Mr Gunnery’s surprise and annoyance, he would lose all interest in this or that science.  Thus, one day the lad declared himself unable to name two stones set before him, felspar and quartz, and when his instructor broke into angry impatience he turned sullenly away, exclaiming that he was tired of geology.

‘Tired of geology?’ cried Mr. Gunnery, with flaming eyes.  ’Then I am tired of you, Master Peak!  Be off, and don’t come again till I send for you!’

Godwin retired without a word.  On the second day he was summoned back again, but his resentment of the dismissal rankled in him for a long time; injury to his pride was the wrong he found it hardest to forgive.