What folly was this which had sprung up in
his life--folly colossal, unimaginable, as unexpected as though
it had fallen a thunderbolt from the skies! What had happened to
change him so completely!
His thought traveled back to the boarding-house. It was there
that the thing had begun. Before that night upon the roof, the
finger-posts which he had set up with such care and deliberation
along the road which led towards his coveted goal, had seemed to
him to point with unfaltering directness towards everything in
life worthy of consideration. To-night they were only dreary
phantasms, marking time across a miserable plain. Perhaps, after
all, there had been something in his nature, some rebel thing,
intolerable yet to be reckoned with, which had been first born of
that fateful curiosity of his. It had leapt up so suddenly,
sprung with such scanty notice into strenuous and insistent life.
Yet what place had it there? He must fight against it, root it
out with both hands. What was this world of intrigue, this
criminal, undesirable world, to him? His common sense forbade
him altogether to dissociate Elizabeth from her friends, from her
surroundings. She was the secret of the pain which was tearing
at his heartstrings, of all the excitement, the joy, the passion
which had swept like a full flood across the level way of his
life, which had set him drifting among the unknown seas. Yet it
was Beatrice who had brought this upon him.
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