He walked and ran for miles--over the bare downs, through the fertile valleys, and alongside the other railway line; and late that night he got into a feeding train for Salisbury, where, he was told, he would catch a West of England express for London. There was delay at Salisbury, and he ate some food and drank some brandy. Then at last he found himself in the London train, in an empty compartment of a corridor coach. He sat with folded arms, his hat pulled low on his forehead, his eyes peering suspiciously out of the window, or at the door of the corridor. Whenever anybody went by in the corridor, he stooped his head lower and pretended to be asleep. There were strange people in this train--soldiers and sailors from Devonport; some foreigners too, or people dressed up to look like foreigners; numbers of men also who kept their heads down as he was doing, as if for some jolly good private reason. Who the hell were they really? Detectives? The train was going so fast now that it rocked to and fro, and hummed and sang; but it seemed to Dale to be standing still--to be going backward. This illusion was so strong for some moments that he jumped up and went out into the corridor, to look down at the permanent way on that side also. The lamplight from the train showed on both sides that the sleepers, the chairs, the gravel, slipped and slid in the correct direction. The train was flying, simply flying along the inner up-track of the four sets of metals. "I mustn't be so fullish," he kept saying to himself. "I'm all safe now." A sudden noise of voices drew him to the corridor; and he stood holding a hand-rail, watching the leather walls and the gangway that led into the next coach leap and dance and bob and sink, while he listened eagerly. The roar of the train was so great here that he could not catch what the hidden men were saying, but he understood that they were sailors making too much noise and a railway guard rebuking them. "It's nothing to do with me," he said to himself. "Why _am_ I so fullish?" He returned to the compartment, sat with his shoulder to the corridor, and brooded dully and heavily. All that fiery trouble about Mavis and her being dishonored had gone out of his mind as if forever; the grievance and the rage and the hatred had gone too; temporarily there was nothing but a most ponderous self-pity. "What a mess this is," he thought. "What a hash I've made of it. What a cruel thing to happen to me. What an awful hole I've put myself into."