"I have won, I have got my way, I have conquered," he said again and again as he strode along. "God, if there is a God, is giving me my revenge. And if there is any justice in the world, it is just."
Hour after hour he walked; he seemed to be trying to tire himself, to, in some way, throw off the abundant energy that surged within him. Presently he came to a shady dell, where he stopped. At his feet gurgled a stream of clear water. He lay flat on his face and took a long, deep drink.
"I wonder what whisky would taste like now," he said to himself. "It is six years since I touched it, six years; but the first year was a year of torment."
He shuddered at the thought of it. The memory of the time when it held him enslaved was terrible to him even yet.
"But I conquered it," he went on; "I vowed I would, and I have. Had the struggle been ten times as hard, I would have conquered it. No man is master of anything if whisky masters him."
He sat down beneath the tree and ate a simple lunch, then, taking another deep draught of the water, he continued his walk. A high hill was in front of him covered with gorse and bracken. In a few minutes he reached the top, and then he looked around him.
A look of recognition came into his eyes. He saw the cottage at which he had stayed after he had been driven out of Taviton; away in the distance was the pool which the country people said was haunted by the devil. He remembered it when he saw it last as dark and forbidding, but to-day it gleamed in the sunlight. Below him, not much more than a mile away, was the farmhouse in which he had sheltered himself from a storm, when he was planning what he should do with his life.
Scarcely without knowing why, he turned his footsteps towards the farm.
"I wonder if the woman lives there still?" he said to himself. "Let me see, what was she called? Yes, Mrs. Pethick, I remember now, and she talked religion to me. She believed in it, too!"
He cast his mind back over the years again, and remembered what the woman had said to him.