that he had been deceived and defrauded.

A contempt for his old life and its surroundings crept upon him. He
began to despise the simple country people among whom he had grown up,
and those provincial ideas which they cherished in the little, unknown
nook of the world where they stagnated.

During a long time he permitted himself to be borne upon the current of
these thoughts without trying to stem it, till it seemed as if he would
be swept completely from his moorings. But his trust had been firmly
anchored, and did not easily let go its hold. The convictions of a
lifetime began to reassert themselves. They rose and struggled
heroically for the possession of his spirit.

Had the battle been with the simple abstraction of philosophic doubt,
the good might have prevailed, but there obtruded itself into the field
the concrete form of the gypsy. The glance of her lustrous eye, the
gleam of her milk-white teeth, the heaving of her agitated bosom, the
inscrutable but suggestive expression of her flushed and eager face,
these were foes against which he struggled in vain. A feverish desire,
whose true significance he did not altogether understand, tugged at his
heart, and he felt himself drawn by unseen hands toward this mysterious
and beautiful being. She seemed to him at that awful moment, when his
whole world of thought and feeling was slipping from under his feet, the
one only abiding reality. She at least was not an impalpable vision, but
solid, substantial, palpitating flesh and blood. Like continuously
advancing waves which sooner or later must undermine a dyke, the
passions and suspicions of his newly awakened nature were sapping the
foundations of his belief.