He reached his lodgings, at something after one o’clock, drenched with rain, gloriously indifferent to that and all other chances of life.  Pooh! his system had been radically wrong.  He should have allowed himself recreation once a week or so; he would have been all the better for it, body and mind.  Books and that kind of thing are all very well in their way, but one must live; he had wasted too much of his youth in solitude. O mihi proeteritos referat si Jupiter annos! Next session he would arrange things better.  Success in examinations—­what trivial fuss when one looked at it from the right point of view!  And he had fretted himself into misery, because Chilvers had got more ’marks’,—­ha, ha, ha!

The morrow’s waking was lugubrious enough.  Headache and nausea weighed upon him.  Worse still, a scrutiny of his pockets showed that he had only the shamefaced change of half-a-crown wherewith to transport himself and his belongings to Twybridge.  Now, the railway fare alone was three shillings; the needful cab demanded eighteenpence. 0 idiot!

And he hated the thought of leaving his bill unpaid; the more so because it was a trifling sum, a week’s settlement.  To put himself under however brief an obligation to a woman such as the landlady gnawed at his pride.  Not that only.  He had no business to make a demand upon his mother for this additional sum.  But there was no way of raising the money; no one of whom he could borrow it; nothing he could afford to sell—­even if courage had supported him through such a transaction.  Triple idiot!

Bread turned to bran upon his hot palate; he could only swallow cups of coffee.  With trembling hands he finished the packing of his box and portmanteau, then braced himself to the dreaded interview.  Of 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.