"Yes."
"It is different; more different to me than you can have any idea of.
Then I was a cog in a machine; now I am my own master."
They walked to the end of the piazza, turned, and came down again. They were facing the light now, and her face shone with the pale glow of the declining day. In her black dress, with a soft shawl thrown about her, she was dazzling; and Maurice found it difficult not to take her in his arms then and there.
"It must have been a strange feeling," she observed thoughtfully, "to know that you were not master of your own movements, but had to do as you were told, whether you approved of it or not."
"Strange," he echoed, a sense of slavery coming over him which was far stronger than anything he had felt while the bondage lasted, "it was intolerable!"
"Yet you endured it?" she returned, regarding him curiously.
"Yes, I endured it. In the first place, I thought that it was my duty; and in the second, it was not so hard until I had seen"—
"Well, until you had seen?"—
"Until I had seen you, I was going to say."
Berenice flushed, and tossed her head.