As he stretched himself in the sheets
at daybreak, he told himself that he need never see either of them
again. He was free.
XXVIII.
Lemuel went through the next day in that licence of revolt which
every human soul has experienced in some measure at some time. We
look back at it afterwards, and see it a hideous bondage. But for
the moment Lemuel rejoiced in it; and he abandoned himself boldly to
thoughts that had hitherto been a furtive and trembling rapture.
In the afternoon, when he was most at leisure, he walked down to the
Public Garden, and found a seat on a bench near the fountain where
the Venus had shocked his inexperience the first time he saw her; he
remembered that simple boy with a smile of pity, and then went back
into his cloud of reverie. There, safely hid from trouble and wrong,
he told his ideal how dear she was to him, and how she had shaped
and governed his life, and made it better and nobler from the first
moment they had met. The fumes of the romances which he had read
mixed with the love-born delirium in his brain; he was no longer
low, but a hero of lofty line, kept from his rightful place by
machinations that had failed at last, and now he was leading her,
his bride, into the ancient halls which were to be their home, and
the source of beneficence and hope to all the poor and humbly-born
around them.
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