all the same he was pleased beyond measure to be able to climb onto the mail coach the next morning and begin his journey home to Wanderford Hall. He watched as towns passed by until the coach reached its destination of Peterborough and Fotherby alighted before awaiting a second coach that would take him northwest and into Derbyshire. Occasionally, as he sat waiting, he considered the anticipation that had been cruelly pushed from him by the attitude of the man at the college, but when he found himself considering this he firmly rebuked himself. Self-pity was not a virtue, but a vice of too much self-importance and time.

Night had fallen as he journeyed on toward Manchester, alighting in the dark at a crossroads a short distance from Buxton. The mist that so often clung to the Pennines had blanketed the...

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