rent ill. It was as if he were trying to run away from himself.

He faced round at the mirror on his mantel, and looked at his own image
with staring and startled eyes, his mouth open, the breath coming hard
through his nostrils. "You're a gey ill ane," he said; "you're a gey ill
ane! My God, where have you landed yourself?"

He went out to escape from his thoughts. Instinctively he turned to the
Howff for consolation.

With the panic despair of the weak, he abandoned hope of his character
at its first collapse, and plunged into a wild debauch, to avoid
reflecting where it would lead him in the end. But he had a more
definite reason for prolonging his bout in Edinburgh. He was afraid to
go home and meet his father. He shrank, in visioning fear, before the
dour face, loaded with scorn, that would swing round to meet him as he
entered through the door. Though he swore every night in his cups that
he would "square up to the Governor the morn, so he would!" always, when
the cold light came, fear of the interview drove him to his cups again.
His courage zigzagged, as it always did; one moment he towered in
imagination, the next he grovelled in fear.

Sometimes, when he was fired with whisky, another element entered into
his mood, no less big with destruction. It was all his father's fault
for sending him to Edinburgh, and no matter what happened, it would
serve the old fellow right! He had a kind of fierce satisfaction in his
own ruin, because his ruin would show them at home what a mistake they
had made in sending him to College. It was the old man's tyranny, in
forcing him to College, that had brought all this on his miserable head.
Well, he was damned glad, so he was, that they should be punished at
home by their own foolish scheme--it had punished _him_ enough, for one.
And then he would set his mouth insolent and hard, and drink the more
fiercely, finding a consolation in the thought that his tyrannical
father would suffer through his degradation too.

At last he must go home. He drifted to the station aimlessly; he had
ceased to be self-determined. His compartment happened to be empty; so,
free to behave as he liked, he yelled music-hall snatches in a tuneless
voice, hammering with his feet on the wooden floor. The noise pleased
his sodden mind, which had narrowed to a comfortable stupor--outside of
which his troubles seemed to lie, as if they belonged not to him but to
somebody else. With the same sodden interest