nearly four o'clock
He did not much mind about taking the bad news to Godfrey , for he had to offer him at the same time the resource of Marner 's money ; and if Godfrey kicked , as he always did , at the notion of making a fresh debt from which he himself got the smallest share of advantage , why , he would n't kick long : Dunstan felt sure he could worry Godfrey into anything . The idea of Marner 's money kept growing in vividness , now the want of it had become immediate ; the prospect of having to make his appearance with the muddy boots of a pedestrian at Batherley , and to encounter the grinning queries of stablemen , stood unpleasantly in the way of his impatience to be back at Raveloe and carry out his felicitous plan ; and a casual visitation of his waistcoat-pocket , as he was ruminating , awakened his memory to the fact that the two or three small coins his forefinger encountered there were of too pale a colour to cover that small debt , without payment of which the stable-keeper had declared he would never do any more business with Dunsey Cass . After all , according to the direction in which the run had brought him , he was not so very much farther from home than he was from Batherley ; but Dunsey , not being remarkable for clearness of head , was only led to this conclusion by the gradual perception that there were other reasons for choosing the unprecedented course of walking home . It was now nearly four o'clock , and a mist was gathering : the sooner he got into the road the better . He remembered having crossed the road and seen the finger-post only a little while before Wildfire broke down ; so , buttoning his coat , twisting the lash of his hunting-whip compactly round the handle , and rapping the tops of his boots with a self-possessed air , as if to assure himself that he was not at all taken by surprise , he set off with the sense that he was undertaking a remarkable feat of bodily exertion , which somehow and at some time he should be able to dress up and magnify to the admiration of a select circle at the Rainbow . When a young gentleman like Dunsey is reduced to so exceptional a mode of locomotion as walking , a whip in his hand is a desirable corrective to a too bewildering dreamy sense of unwontedness in his position ; and Dunstan , as he went along through the gathering mist , was always rapping his whip somewhere . It was Godfrey 's whip , which he had chosen to take without leave because it had a gold handle ; of course no one could see , when Dunstan held it , that the name _ Godfrey Cass _ was cut in deep letters on that gold handle -- they could only see that it was a very handsome whip .