of head, was only led to this conclusion by the gradual perception
that there were other reasons for choosing the unprecedented course
of walking home. It was now nearly four o'clock, and a mist was
gathering: the sooner he got into the road the better. He
remembered having crossed the road and seen the 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.