MARIUS ENSNARED
When the Countess Lavinia saw her chair and page disappearing down the street, when she found herself standing alone, with perfect freedom before her, a sudden giddiness seized her, and she caught at one of the street posts, utterly at a loss.
This part of the town was new to her, she had traversed it only once or twice before, and then in a coach.
The resolve that had brought her so far faded before the novelty, the extraordinary novelty of her situation; she looked about her with wondering eyes, hardly able to believe that she, a prisoner all her life to someone or something, had dared so much, that she really stood there, unnoticed, unquestioned, free.
Let whatever would happen hereafter, whether she had to pay or no, whether she failed or succeeded in her desperate attempt to alter her life, the next few hours were hers absolutely, to do what she would with.
She looked up at the clock and saw that it was close on seven. There were very few people about; on the steps of the church a woman sat selling roses in a green rush basket; an empty hackney rolled over the cobbles; above the irregular roofs of the houses the sky showed a faint flushed gold stained with little torn clouds of deep pink.
The Countess, acting on no impulse save that of her sudden freedom, turned in the direction where she knew the river must lie.
Following closely built, winding streets, noticing with an eager and unaccountable interest little things—a thrush in a wicker cage, a woman knitting in a doorway, a child playing with a white rabbit, a girl leaning from a window watering a pot of wallflowers—asking a direction once in a small baker's shop, and again of a chair-mender installed at the corner of a street, the Countess Lavinia found her way to the Thames.
The great river lay in a silver sullenness beneath the clear dome of the sky; its ceaseless ripples were outlined in threads of gold; gold shimmered in the sails of the brown boats floating by, and on the roofs of the houses on the Southwark side. The Countess found it beautiful beyond anything she had imagined; an air of gay peace lay over it all, an atmosphere of pure contentment.