It was about the third week in January that Peter reached a certain town named Congleton, and leaving it behind him, walked towards a mountain named the Cloud.  
The weather was now inclement; cold winds blew, driving showers of sleet and rain assailed him, making the progress of the vagabond Peter far from pleasant.
 
Bundle on back, his hands deep in the pockets of a rough frieze overcoat he had purchased some three months previously, he tramped along the road, Democritus at his heels. It might well be wondered why Peter did not seek some lodging during these inclement months, and in answer there is nothing to say beyond the fact that a certain odd strain in him led him to continue his present mode of living. He preferred inclemency of weather, entire isolation, to life under a roof, with the chance of meeting his fellow-men. Perhaps it was strange, but after all had he not already spent more than two years on the roads, so may not the love of the open have taken possession of him? At all events it is not what he might have done, but what he actually did, with which this history has to deal.
 
Somewhere up on the top of the Cloud, with its back to a small wood of pines and with a strip of moorland and then the road in front of it, stands a small deserted hut. It is no more than a hovel of one tiny room, and perhaps at one time it was used as a shepherd’s shelter.
 
It was drawing on to the wintry dusk when Peter saw it in the gloom, lying to the left of him from the road. He crossed the strip of moorland and went towards it. He found it, as he had fancied he might, entirely empty. There was a hole in the roof through which the rain was driving and the broken door rattled on its hinges. It was very different from a cottage he had discovered some months previously, but it was at all events some kind of shelter, and the cold without was bitter.
 
“We’ll take possession,” said Peter to Democritus. [Pg 264]“It cannot be styled a princely habitation—in fact, it’s uncommonly wretched. But I fancy it will be more desirable than the road to-night.”
 
He unfastened his bundle and set it on the earth floor. Outside the wind howled in fury; mist, rain, and gathering dusk blotted out the landscape beyond the road.
 
“Ugh!” said Peter with a shudder, “it’s remarkably unpleasant.”
 
He unpacked his bundle. There was half a loaf of bread, a tin of sardines, a bottle of water, a small flask of whisky, and a bone with some meat on it for Democritus.
 
They finished their meal together, and then Peter still sat with his back to the wall, as far away from the broken door as possible, watching the rain that fell through the hole in the roof. For nearly the first time since he had begun his wanderings he was physically wretched. Fate had for a short time lifted his mental loneliness from him, only to plunge him deeper into it. Mental loneliness, however, he had done his best to accept with what philosophy he might, but now physical loneliness, entire discomfort, and bodily [Pg 265]depression were weighing hard upon him. He felt he had lost the grit to fight further. A quixotic action of long ago suddenly presented itself to him as an entirely idiotic proceeding on his part. Why on earth had he ruined his own life, cut himself off from communion with his fellow-men, for a mere romantic notion?
 
“I’m beaten,” said Peter to himself, “done! I fancied I was doing a fine thing. I thought myself, no doubt, a bit of a hero; and now I’m a coward, a turncoat, who’d give a very great deal to undo the past.”
 
He was wretched, entirely wretched, and even the soft warm tongue of Democritus against his hand was of no smallest comfort to him.
 
He looked at the bundle on the ground beside him. It contained his manuscript, fair, complete but for the title and signature and the dedication should he choose to give it one. It brought him no atom of pleasure; it appeared to him worthless, a thing of false sentiment, talking of high courage, of nobility of thought, which in reality vanished like a pricked air-bubble the moment the finger of fact was laid upon it.
 
How in the name of fortune had he kept his spirits buoyed up all these years? And why in Heaven’s name had the buoyancy suddenly deserted him? Peter turned about in his mind for a solution of the problem. Presently he found it. It came with something like a shock. He was older, that was the reason. Close on six years had rolled over his head since the day he had surrendered all for an extravagant notion. It is the young, Peter reflected sagely, who take their all and throw it with both hands on the altar of sacrifice. They do not realize—how should they in their youthful optimism?—what they are giving up. Th............