than once, during the time, he had regarded himself as admonished;
but the admonition this morning was formidably sharp. It took as
it hadn't done yet the form of a question--the question of what he
was doing with such an extraordinary sense of escape. This sense
was sharpest after he had read his letters, but that was also
precisely why the question pressed. Four of the letters were from
Mrs. Newsome and none of them short; she had lost no time, had
followed on his heels while he moved, so expressing herself that
he now could measure the probable frequency with which he should
hear. They would arrive, it would seem, her communications, at the
rate of several a week; he should be able to count, it might even
prove, on more than one by each mail. If he had begun yesterday
with a small grievance he had therefore an opportunity to begin
to-day with its opposite. He read the letters successively and
slowly, putting others back into his pocket but keeping these for
a long time afterwards gathered in his lap. He held them there,
lost in thought, as if to prolong the presence of what they gave
him; or as if at the least to assure them their part in the
constitution of some lucidity. His friend wrote admirably, and her
tone was even more in her style than in her voice--he might
almost, for the hour, have had to come this distance to get its
full carrying quality; yet the plentitude of his consciousness of
difference consorted perfectly with the deepened intensity of the
connexion. It was the difference, the difference of being just
where he was and AS he was, that formed the escape--this
difference was so much greater than he had dreamed it would be;
and what he finally sat there turning over was the strange logic
of his finding himself so free. He felt it in a manner his duty to
think out his state, to approve the process, and when he came in
fact to trace the steps and add up the items they sufficiently