The whirring of the wheels made a pleasant accompaniment to his thoughts.  He was enjoying his flight, which signified anything but shame and disgrace.  In his complete absorption, he discovered himself picking little threads from his clothes, like a spider’s cobweb, and he observed how with each minute he drew his breath more freely.  Sometimes it seemed to him that the wheels of the tremendous express train were not turning swiftly enough on their axles, and that he himself ought to put his hands to the wheels to hasten on the new health-giving impressions and place them behind him like thin curtains, so that the partitions dividing him from that dangerous, fatal magnet which he had left behind should grow denser and denser.

In New Haven, where the train halted for a short time, a negro with sandwiches and a boy with newspapers passed through the train.  Frederick bought one of the papers, and found the whole disaster of the Roland warmed up over again in connection with the sensational reports of the hearing in the City Hall.  On that bright winter day his mood was too gay and peaceful to suffer the appalling impressions of the sinking of the vessel and its drowning mass of humanity to revive in his soul.  To be sure, he had had absolutely no right to escape, and he was still somewhat ashamed that the regnant powers had preferred him to so many innocent brothers and sisters.  On that account, there had been a time when he would have given back his life in a passion of embittered pity and glowing indignation; for there was no sin great enough to justify that horrible, brutal drowning on the seas and no merit great enough to justify escape from it.  But on this winter day, on his flight from New York, his rescue filled him with nothing but sincere gratitude.  Captain von Kessel and the many others that had gone down with the Roland were dead and so were removed from all pain and suffering.  Everything about Frederick this day breathed an atmosphere of convalescence and reconciliation.

All the way from New Haven to Meriden he regaled himself with the sketch of Ingigerd’s life that appeared in the papers.  He could scarcely keep from laughing.  Lilienfeld displayed a positively poetical, exuberant imagination.  Though Ingigerd’s father was of German parentage and her mother a French Swiss, Ingigerd figured as the scion of a noble Swedish family, and the body of a relative of hers was reported to be resting in the Riddarholms-Kyrka in Stockholm.  The impresario well knew that Americans are fascinated by a single drop of royal blood.

“Poor little thing!” thought Frederick, as he folded up the newspaper.  Then, at the sudden realisation of what tremendous import the “poor little thing” had until that moment been to him and others, he clapped his hand to his brow and muttered, “That’s over and done with, that’s over and done with,” and swore several oaths at himself.

XXIV