Page:The Yellow Book - 08.djvu/299

"God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men are—or even as this."

He had been pleased. Yes; he had been pleased. Dwelling over it now it seemed to bear a fantastic, indeed a blasphemous significance. Why had he been pleased? He must know. Gazing around once more with arms stretched out in yearning love for the prospect and what it meant to him, he recognised that for the life within him, glorious, promising, full of possibilities of God only knew what greatness and joy, he had been rapturously happy that he was not as that corpse: a dead man after a life of much and grinding misery, such as the constant struggle for existence implies for the labourer in a sterile country.

Heaven be praised, he was not as that cold clay, but young and strong and lusty, free as the ocean behind him, strong as the hills before him, and full, full, full to the lips, of vivid pulsing life.

Sorry? Was he sorry to be leaving this place where there were less than a dozen houses, for the town where they reckoned them by hundreds? He knew he was not sorry.

Was he sorry for one moment to leave anyone in it; any single person, beautiful Johanna for example, with her red rose mouth, her pink cheeks melting in a rich cream, her chestnut hair with the love locks curling tendril-wise upon her brow? Would there be one pang for her? He passed down from the promontory to the shore, and from the shore to the road, with his mind strangely fixed upon Johanna, meeting and greeting many families in carrioles and stolkjærres, and on horse-back, who were on their way to the church.

Not that he had encouraged the thought of her habitually. Indeed it was she who had encouraged him. She had what hecalled