For several days he scarcely left the house.  To wrath and dread had succeeded a wretched torpor, during which his mind kept revolving the thoughts prompted by his situation, turbidly and to no issue.  He tasted all the bitterness of the solitude to which he had condemned himself; there was not a living soul with whom he could commune.  At moments he was possessed with the desire of going straightway to London, and making Earwaker the confidant of all his folly.  But that demanded an exertion of which he was physically incapable.  He thought of the old home at Twybridge, and was tempted also in that direction.  His mother would welcome him with human kindness; beneath her roof he could lie dormant until fate should again point his course.  He even wrote a letter saying that in all probability he should pay a visit to Twybridge before long.  But the impulse was only of an hour’s duration, for he remembered that to talk with his mother would necessitate all manner of new falsehoods, a thickening of the atmosphere of lies which already oppressed him.  No; if he quitted Exeter, it must be on a longer journey.  He must resume his purpose of seeking some distant country, where new conditions of life would allow him to try his fortune at least as an honest adventurer.  In many parts of colonial England his technical knowledge would have a value, and were there not women to be won beneath other skies—­women perhaps of subtler charm than the old hidebound civilisation produced?  Reminiscences of scenes and figures in novels he had read nourished the illusion.  He pictured some thriving little town at the ends of the earth, where a young Englishman of good manners and unusual culture would easily be admitted to the intimacy of the richest families; he saw the ideal colonist (a man of good birth, but a sower of wild oats in his youth) with two or three daughters about him—­beautiful girls, wondrously self-instructed—­living amid romantic dreams of the old world, and of the lover who would some day carry them off (with a substantial share of papa’s wealth) to Europe and the scenes of their imagination.

The mind has marvellous methods of self-defence against creeping lethargy of despair.  At the point to which he had been reduced by several days of blank despondency, Peak was able to find genuine encouragement in visions such as this.  He indulged his fancy until the vital force began to stir once more within him, and then, with one angry sweep, all his theological books and manuscripts were flung out of sight.  Away with this detestable mummery!  Now let Bruno Chilvers pour his eloquence from the pulpit of St. Margaret’s, and rear to what heights he could the edifice of his social glory; men of that stamp were alone fitted to thrive in England.  Was not~ he almost certainly a hypocrite, masking his brains (for brains he had) under a show of broadest Anglicanism?  But his career was throughout consistent.  He trod in the footsteps of his father, and with inherited aptitude moulded antique traditions into harmony with the taste of the times.  Compared with such a man, Peak felt himself a bungler.  The wonder was that his clumsy lying had escaped detection.