man,--he thought, stretching out his hands,--free to work, to
live, to love! Free! His right! He folded the scrap of paper
in his hand. As his nervous fingers took it in, limp and
blotted, so his soul took in the mean temptation, lapped it in
fancied rights, in dreams of improved existences, drifting and
endless as the cloud-seas of color. Clutching it, as if the
tightness of his hold would strengthen his sense of possession,
he went aimlessly down the street. It was his watch at the
mill. He need not go, need never go again, thank God!--shaking
off the thought with unspeakable loathing.

Shall I go over the history of the hours of that night? how the
man wandered from one to another of his old haunts, with a half-
consciousness of bidding them farewell,--lanes and alleys and
back-yards where the mill-hands lodged,--noting, with a new
eagerness, the filth and drunkenness, the pig-pens, the ash-
heaps covered with potato-skins, the bloated, pimpled women at
the doors, with a new disgust, a new sense of sudden triumph,
and, under all, a new, vague dread, unknown before, smothered
down, kept under, but still there? It left him but once during
the night, when, for the second time in his life, he entered a
church. It was a sombre Gothic pile, where the stained light
lost itself in far-retreating arches; built to meet the
requirements and sympathies of a far other class than Wolfe's.
Yet it touched, moved him uncontrollably. The distances, the
shadows, the still, marble figures, the mass of silent kneeling
worshippers, the mysterious music, thrilled, lifted his soul
with a wonderful pain. Wolfe forgot himself, forgot the new
life he was going to live, the mean terror gnawing underneath.
The voice of the speaker strengthened the charm; it was clear,