to a supper of such viands as recommend themselves at bibulous
midnight. Peak was drawing recklessly upon the few coins that
remained to him; he must leave his landlady's claim undischarged,
and send the money from home. Prudence be hanged! If one cannot
taste amusement once in a twelvemonth, why live at all?

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