ries,
glide between the lines, with her head held high, her hand in George
Bolingbroke's, her white slippers skimming the polished floor. Then
turning away, I walked slowly down the length of the two drawing-rooms,
and said "Good-night" to Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca near the door. As I
passed into the hall, I heard a woman's voice murmur distinctly:--

"Yes, he is a magnificent animal, but he has no social manner."

CHAPTER XII

I WALK INTO THE COUNTRY AND MEET WITH AN ADVENTURE

My sleep that night was broken by dreams of roses and pink-shaded lamps.
For the first time in my life my brain and body alike refused rest, and
the one was illumined as by the rosy glow of a flame, while the other
was scorched by a fever which kept me tossing sleeplessly between Mrs.
Clay's lavender-scented sheets. At last when the sun rose, I got out of
bed, and hurriedly dressing, went up Franklin Street, and turned into
one of the straight country roads which led through bronzed levels of
broomsedge. Eastward the sun was ploughing a purple furrow across the
sky, and toward the south a single golden cloud hung over some thin
stretches of pine. The ghost of a moon, pale and watery, was riding low,
after a night of high frolic, and as the young dawn grew stronger, I
watched her melt gradually away like a face that one sees through smoke.
The October wind, blowing with a biting edge over the broomsedge, bent
the blood-red tops of the sumach like pointed flames toward the road.

For me a new light shone on the landscape--a light that seemed to have
its part in the high wind, in the waving broomsedge, and in the rising
sun. For the first time since those old days in the churchyard I felt
with every fibre of me, with every beat of my pulses, with every drop of
my blood, that it was good to be alive--that it was worth while every
bit of it. My starved boyhood, the drudgery in the tobacco factory, the
breathless nights in the Old Market, the hours when, leaning over
Johnson's Dictionary, I had been obliged to pinch myself to keep wide
awake--the squalor out of which I had come, and the future into which I
was going--all these were a part to-day of this strange new ecstasy that
sang in the wind and moved in the waving broomsedge.

And through it all ran my thoughts: "How fragrant the white rose was in
her hair! How tremulous her mouth! Are her eyes grey or green, and is it
only the heavy shadow of her lashes that makes them appear black