Fay and he could marry now. The thought of her, the hungered craving for her was no longer a sin.
It was Sunday evening. The myriad bells of Venice were borne in a floating gossamer tangle of sound across the water.
Joy, overwhelming, suffocating joy inundated him.
He stumbled to his feet, and clung convulsively to the bars of his narrow window.
How often he had heard the bells, but never with this voice!
He looked out across the wide water with its floating islands, each with its little campanile. His eyes followed the sails of the fishing boats from Chioggia, floating like scarlet and orange butterflies in the pearl haze of the lagoon.
How often he had watched them in pain. How often he had turned his eyes from them lest that mad rage for freedom which entered at times into the man in the next cell, when the boats passed, should enter also into him, and break him upon its wheel.
He looked at the boats now with tears in his eyes. They gleamed at him like a promise straight from God. How freely they moved. Free as air; free as the sea-mew with its harsh cry wheeling close at hand under a luminous sky.
He also should be free soon, should float away past the gleaming islands, over a sea of pearl in a boat with an orange sail.
For Fay would come to him. The one woman in the world of counterfeits would come to him, and set him free. She would take him in her arms at last, and lay her cool healing touch upon his aching life. And he would lean his forehead against her breast, and his long apprenticeship to love would be over. It seemed to Michael that she was here already, her soft cheek against his.