A brooding intensity of rage, as this inward process went on, gradually drowned in him every other feeling and desire.  The relief and amusement of the money and its spending were soon over.  He thought no more of it.  Anita, and his child even—­the child for whom he really cared—­passed out of his mind.  As he sat drinking whisky in the dull respectable lodging, at night after Anita had gone to bed, he felt the sinister call of those dark woods above Rachel’s farm, and tasted the sweetness of his new power to hurt her, now that she had paid him this blackmail, and damned herself thereby—­past help.  She had threatened him.  But what could she do—­or the Yankee fellow either?  She had given the show away.  As for his promise, when he had no right to make it,—­no right to allow such a woman to get off scot-free, with plenty of money and a new lover.

So on the Thursday evening he took train for X. It was still the Armistice week.  The London streets were crowded with soldiers and young women of every sort and kind.  He bought a newspaper and read it in the train.  It gave him a queer satisfaction—­for one half of him was still always watching the other—­to discover that he could feel patriotic emotion like anybody else and could be thrilled by the elation of Britain’s victory—­his victory.  He read the telegrams, the positions on the Rhine assigned to the Second Army, and the Fourth,—­General Plumer General Rawlinson—­General F.—­Gad! he used to know the son of that last old fellow at King’s.

Then he fell to his old furtive watching of the people on the platform, the men getting in and out of the train.  At any moment he might fall in with one of his old Cambridge acquaintances, in one of these smart officers, with their decorations and their red tabs.  But in the first place they wouldn’t travel in this third class where he was sitting—­not till the war was over.  And in the next, he was so changed—­had taken indeed such pains to be—­that it was long odds against his being recognized.  Eleven years, was it, since he left Cambridge?  About.

At X. he got out.  The ticket collector noticed him for that faint touch of a past magnificence that still lingered in his carriage and gait; but there were so many strangers about that he was soon forgotten.

He passed under a railway arch and climbed a hill, the hill on which he had met Dempsey.  At the top of the hill he left the high-road for a grass track across the common.  There was just enough light from a declining moon to show him where he was.  The common was full of dark shapes—­old twisted thorns, and junipers, and masses of tall grass—­shapes which often seemed to him to be strargely alive, the silent but conscious witnesses of his passage.