With no evident reason, came back
to him to-night the beautiful weeping figure of the Italian as she had
cast herself at his feet and implored his forgiveness. He would not go
to her now until he was calmer, and until he had considered carefully
all the points of the situation.
In that whirl which comes in desperate circumstances before the
startled and bewildered thoughts can be reduced to order, Herman
wandered on, not thinking where he was going, until he found himself
leaning against a railing and looking over the waters of the Charles
River. It was a beautiful starlight night with a wavering wind that
came in uncertain gusts only to die away again. The water was like a
flood of ink, across which streamed thin tremulous lines of brightness,
and over which were strewn the flickering reflections of the stars. The
gas jets of the city across the flood, the rows of lamps which marked
the bridges, the distant horse cars which rumbled between Cambridge and
Boston with their colored lights, the green and red lanterns that
glowed from the railroad tracks farther down the river, all suggested
the busy life of men with its passions, its greed, and its
heartlessness; but the darkness held all remote, as if the world of men
were a dream. And overhead the immovable stars, like the unpitying
gods, hung above the city and were reflected in the water, and wounded
the soul of the lonely man with the terrible sense of power inimitably
removed, of passionless strength which served to humanity but as a
measure of its own weakness and triviality.
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