Godwin turned the key in his bedroom door, and strayed aimlessly about.  He was fatigued, but the white, fragrant bed did not yet invite him; a turbulence in his brain gave warning that it would be long before he slept.  He wound up his watch; the hands pointed to twelve.  Chancing to come before the mirror, he saw that he was unusually pale, and that his eyes had a swollen look.

The profound stillness was oppressive to him; he started nervously at an undefined object in a dim corner, and went nearer to examine it; he was irritable, vaguely discontented, and had even a moment of nausea, perhaps the result of tobacco stronger than he was accustomed to smoke.  After leaning for five minutes at the open window, he felt a soothing effect from the air, and could think consecutively of the day’s events.  What had happened seemed to him incredible; it was as though he revived a mad dream, of ludicrous coherence.  Since his display of rhetoric at luncheon all was downright somnambulism.  What fatal power had subdued him?  What extraordinary influence had guided his tongue, constrained his features?  His conscious self had had no part in all this comedy; now for the first time was he taking count of the character he had played.

Had he been told this morning that—­Why, what monstrous folly was all this?  Into what unspeakable baseness had he fallen?  Happily, he had but to take leave of the Warricombe household, and rush into some region where he was unknown.  Years hence, he would relate the story to Earwaker.

For a long time he suffered the torments of this awakening. shame buffeted him on the right cheek and the left; he looked about like one who slinks from merited chastisement.  Oh, thrice ignoble varlet!  To pose with unctuous hypocrisy before people who had welcomed him under their roof, unquestioned, with all the grace and kindliness of English hospitality!  To lie shamelessly in the face of his old fellow-student, who had been so genuinely glad to meet him again!

Yet such possibility had not been unforeseen.  At the times of his profound gloom, when solitude and desire crushed his spirit, he had wished that fate would afford him such an opportunity of knavish success.  His imagination had played with the idea that a man like himself might well be driven to this expedient, and might even use it with life-long result.  Of a certainty, the Church numbered such men among her priests,—­not mere lukewarm sceptics who made religion a source of income, nor yet those who had honestly entered the portal and by necessity were held from withdrawing, though their convictions had changed; but deliberate schemers from the first, ambitious but hungry natures, keen-sighted, unscrupulous.  And they were at no loss to defend themselves against the attack of conscience.  Life is a terrific struggle for all who begin it with no endowments save their brains.  A hypocrite was not necessarily a harm-doer; easy to picture the unbelieving priest whose influence was vastly for good, in word and deed.