and forget all about
him. He was sure that he could play upon the individual self-interest of
the leaders of the community to make them respect him and ignore what he
had done. But what he had done, did not bother him much. It was done.

He seemed to be free, yet was he free?

Now Thomas Van Dorn was thirty-eight years old that autumn. Whether he
loved the woman he had abandoned or not, she was a part of his life.
Counting the courtship during which he and this woman had been
associated closely, nearly ten years of his life, half of the years of
his manhood--and that half the most active and effective part, had been
spent with her. A million threads of memory in his brain led to her;
when he remembered any important event in his life during those ten
years, always the chain of associated thought led back to the image of
her. There she was, fixed in his life; there she smiled at him through
every hour of those ten years of their life, married or as lovers
together.

For whom God had joined, not Joseph Calvin, not Joseph Calvin, sitting
as Judge protem, not Joseph Calvin vested with all the authority of the
great commonwealth in which he lived, could put asunder. That was
curious. At times Thomas Van Dorn was conscious of this phenomenon, that
he was free, yet bound, and that while there was no God, and the law was
the final word, in all considerable things, some way the brain, or the
mind that is fettered to the brain, or the soul that is built upon the
aspect of the mind fettered to the brain, held him tethered to the past.

For our lives are not material, whatever our bodies may be. Our lives
are the accumulations of consciousness, the assembling of our memories,
our affections, our judgments, our aspirations, our weaknesses, our
strength--the vast sum of all our impressions, good or bad, made upon a
material plate called the brain. The brain is of the dust. The
picture--which is a human life--is of the spirit. And the spirit is of
God. And when by whatever laws of chance or greed, or high purpose or
low desire two lives are joined until the cement of years has united the
myriads of daily sensations that make up a segment of these lives, they
are thus joined in the spirit forever.

Now Thomas Van Dorn went about his free life day by day, glorying in his
liberty. But strands of his old life, floating idly and unnoticed
through minutes of his hourly existence, kept tripping him and bothering
him. His meals, his clo