WALKING HOME _He that covereth a transgression seeketh love; but he that repeateth a matter separateth very friends._ PROVERBS XVII. YOU may walk out of a house and yet carry it with you, just as you may cross the Channel and yet always take England with you among your baggage. Francis carried James Lawrie's house with him on his back like a snail's shell. He could not get the thought of Bennett out of his head, and the thought of Bennett made him sensitive as he had never been to the squalor through which he had to pass on the way home. Everything in him was disturbed. His comfortable good-nature rather than his religion had made him accept the world as good in essence, and he had always done what he could to alleviate poverty and to comfort distress when they had come knocking at his door, but moral distress such as he had found in old Lawrie and divined in old Lawrie's son he had never looked for and never seen. One thing only in his life had so disturbed him, the episode, years and years ago, of the murder in Potsham, but that he had not grasped so fully; it had been so easy to conventionalise it, to watch the man be swallowed up by the machinery of punishment and forget, to pass on to--what had he passed on to? He was dismayed to find himself thinking of his wooing. Even then he had not taken the trouble to understand what he was doing; and the result? Would it have been different if he had taken the trouble to understand? Old Lawrie seemed to take an immense amount of trouble to understand, and look at the pass to which he had brought himself. He passed the end of a dismal trough of a street--there were hundreds like it in his parish--and the sight of it led him to the thought of poverty. Perhaps, he told himself, perhaps his disasters and old Lawrie's were due only to the fact that they were poor men, too poor for the responsibilities of wife and children they had taken upon themselves. . . . But that must be nonsense. There would soon be an end of everything if the great processes of the world were to be screwed down to the money standard, if . . . But that was too difficult. He must see old Lawrie again. Quite obviously he must think things out, but he was incapable of doing so alone, and admitted it to himself. He liked walking and resented this intrusion of thought upon his pleasure. He had been a fool and supposed that he must pay for his folly, and only hoped that the price asked would not be more than he could pay. He had a feeling that he was only at the beginning of some stupendous change, and on the whole he was excited by it, until he began to think, and then it all lay so far beyond his grasp that he was depressed. One thing relieved him--the knowledge that he had no regret for the fleshpots and the fat glebes of the two Cornish livings of his early manhood.