id not notice that she had altered, but the
next day he remembered that her face looked smaller and more delicate,
like a tinted egg-shell he had once seen, and that her eyes in
consequence were wondrously, were almost startlingly, large. All that he
was conscious of when he turned and rushed from her after that one look,
was that the old agony of his loss had resurged afresh in his heart.

CHAPTER IV

HIS DAY OF FREEDOM

He crossed the courtyard, and turned mechanically into a street which
led in the opposite direction from the road to Old Church. A crowd of
men, gathered in the doorway of the post-office, called to him to join
them, and he answered in a voice that sounded remote and cheerful in his
own ears.

"If you want to whip the bosses in these parts there's a man for you,"
he heard one of them remark, and knew that they were discussing his
political chances. Quickening his steps, he walked rapidly to the end
of the street, passed the scattered negro hovels, surrounded by blighted
sunflowers, and turned into a road which ran between fields of dusty
stubble into a stretch of brown and desolate country.

Suddenly, as though a screw had loosened in his brain, he felt his
passion slip the control of his will and beat down, one by one, the
orderly procession of reasons that had risen against it. A sense of
exhilaration, of joy so fierce that it was akin to pain, took possession
of him. "I won't go back!" he said defiantly, "I won't go back!" And
with the words his longing for Molly was swallowed up in the tumultuous
consciousness of his release. It was as if he had burst his bonds by a
single effort of strength, and was stretching his cramped limbs in the
open. The idea of escape from captivity was so strong, that he looked
neither to right or left of him, but kept his gaze fixed on the road
straight ahead, as a man does who saves his energy for the final break
from his pursuers. At the moment he would have bartered his soul in
exchange for the unholy, the nameless rapture of the vagabond and the
gipsy, of all the neglected and the despised of civilization. Duty,
love, ambition--all these were nothing beside the perfect, the
incommunicable passion of the open road!

It is a mood that comes once to every man--to some men more
frequently--a mood in which the prehistoric memory of the soul is
stirred, and an intolerable longing arises for the ancient nomadic
freedom of the race; when the senses surfeited b