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.
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