At the very next wayside inn he dismounted and called boisterously for food. Munching this, with a confident digestion, by a jolly fire, and delighting in every purple bead of _Clos Vougeot_ that swam to his glass rim, he would give his fancies, as the freeborn children of a Bohemian, rein to run as they listed, and would even humour them to the top bent of his inclination. Well, their order--or absence of it--might be this: Position and respectability; a park, a carriage-road, trim servants, nice-mannered children; a stake in the county and a sober reputation to prop it; an admirable cold wife, in whom an innate artificiality should be tuned to the musical pitch of sentiment; on every side a thickset hedge of formality and restriction, where-through one decent passage alone should be pierced--the stone-flagged way to the tremendously enduring family vault;--and at the last, the precise misrepresentation of a ruled epitaph. Good! And now from the olive to the wine: Life--the life that he understood and could rejoice in--away from the flint road and spurring on to the downs; the life of heath and water and wood, of the blown blue sky and the whirled pollen of flowers; of light and gloom, risk and effort and reward; of the great breath of change and freedom, and--ah! yes: of the sympathizing soft heart to be always waiting him at the blossoming corner; the spirit to often share with him the wanderings and the marvels, and to pull him down into the sweet-smelling brake at shut of eve, and so for both to make a common cause of dreams. Which was the happier picture? And yet a very fragrant perfume would cling about the presentment of that white gentle-born Angela; and sometimes even now it would appear a profanation to him to hold her cheaply in his thoughts. He would not. If a certain shame-faced exultation over his latest emancipation would stir oddly in him from time to time, he would not so far abuse the trust his own heart had placed in a recent sentiment as to set up a new idol in the niche of a fallen image. Angela might be deposed; but--for the present at least--no other should usurp her throne.