Only one other item was needed to steel the heart of Harvey against its idol, and that item they found upon another page. It read, "Wanted, pupils for the piano--Mrs. Laura Van Dorn, Quality Hill, Elm Street." Those items told the whole story of the deed that Thomas Van Dorn had done. If he had felt bees sting before he got his decree, he should have felt vipers gnawing at his vitals afterward. But he was free--the burden of matrimony was lifted. He felt that the whole world of women was his now for the choosing, and of all that world, he turned in wanton fancy to the beckoning arms of Margaret Fenn. But the feeling of freedom, the knowledge that he could speak to any woman as he chose and no one could gainsay him legally, the consciousness that he had no ties which the law recognized--and with him law was the synonym of morality--the exuberant sense of relief from a bondage that was oppressive to him, overbore all the influence of the town's spirit of wrath in the air about him. As for the morality of the town and what he regarded as its prudery--he scorned it. He believed he could live it down; he said in his heart that it was merely a matter of a few weeks, a few months, or a few years at most, before they would have some fresh ox to gore and forget all about him. He was sure that he could play upon the individual self-interest of the leaders of the community to make them respect him and ignore what he had done. But what he had done, did not bother him much. It was done. He seemed to be free, yet was he free? Now Thomas Van Dorn was thirty-eight years old that autumn. Whether he loved the woman he had abandoned or not, she was a part of his life. Counting the courtship during which he and this woman had been associated closely, nearly ten years of his life, half of the years of his manhood--and that half the most active and effective part, had been spent with her. A million threads of memory in his brain led to her; when he remembered any important event in his life during those ten years, always the chain of associated thought led back to the image of her. There she was, fixed in his life; there she smiled at him through every hour of those ten years of their life, married or as lovers together. For whom God had joined, not Joseph Calvin, not Joseph Calvin, sitting as Judge protem, not Joseph Calvin vested with all the authority of the great commonwealth in which he lived, could put asunder. That was curious. At times Thomas Van Dorn was conscious of this phenomenon, that he was free, yet bound, and that while there was no God, and the law was the final word, in all considerable things, some way the brain, or the mind that is fettered to the brain, or the soul that is built upon the aspect of the mind fettered to the brain, held him tethered to the past.