CHAPTER LX.

For some days Laura had been a free woman once more. During this time,

she had experienced--first, two or three days of triumph, excitement,

congratulations, a sort of sunburst of gladness, after a long night of

gloom and anxiety; then two or three days of calming down, by degrees

--a receding of tides, a quieting of the storm-wash to a murmurous

surf-beat, a diminishing of devastating winds to a refrain that bore the

spirit of a truce-days given to solitude, rest, self-communion, and the

reasoning of herself into a realization of the fact that she was actually

done with bolts and bars, prison, horrors and impending, death; then came

a day whose hours filed slowly by her, each laden with some remnant,

some remaining fragment of the dreadful time so lately ended--a day

which, closing at last, left the past a fading shore behind her and

turned her eyes toward the broad sea of the future. So speedily do we

put the dead away and come back to our place in the ranks to march in the

pilgrimage of life again.

And now the sun rose once more and ushered in the first day of what Laura

comprehended and accepted as a new life.

The past had sunk below the horizon, and existed no more for her;

she was done with it for all time. She was gazing out over the trackless

expanses of the future, now, with troubled eyes. Life must be begun

again--at eight and twenty years of age. And where to begin? The page

was blank, and waiting for its first record; so this was indeed a

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The Gilded Age