Page:George Gibbs--Love of Monsieur.djvu/219

 and anguish wrung his heart from his body as nothing—not even the loss of the papers—had done.

The old life in London, with its gaming, its carousing and gallantry—he could see it all through new eyes, washed clean and clear by the purging winds and storms of heaven. Himself he marked from a great moral distance, almost as though from another planet—the silly, spoiled child of folly that he had been. And it was this impotent creature who had cried out against his fate, which, with a rare honesty, had only lowered him from the high estate to which he had won, in accordance with the same inexorable regulations of the human law which had raised him there. The figures in that London life passed before him like a row of tawdry puppets, serving the same martyrdom to folly as himself, at the expense of love, charity, and all true virtue. Soft thinking for a powder-blackened, bearded flibustier, with hands even yet red from his last depredation! He smiled supinely to himself, that he could think thus of the things that so recently had been his very 207