The Senate recognized the fact that it could not be contaminated by sitting a few days longer with Senator Dilworthy, and so it accepted the committee’s report and dropped the unimportant matter.

Mr. Dilworthy occupied his seat to the last hour of the session.  He said that his people had reposed a trust in him, and it was not for him to desert them.  He would remain at his post till he perished, if need be.

His voice was lifted up and his vote cast for the last time, in support of an ingenious measure contrived by the General from Massachusetts whereby the President’s salary was proposed to be doubled and every Congressman paid several thousand dollars extra for work previously done, under an accepted contract, and already paid for once and receipted for.

Senator Dilworthy was offered a grand ovation by his friends at home, who said that their affection for him and their confidence in him were in no wise impaired by the persecutions that had pursued him, and that he was still good enough for them.

—­[The $7,000 left by Mr. Noble with his state legislature was placed in safe keeping to await the claim of the legitimate owner.  Senator Dilworthy made one little effort through his protege the embryo banker to recover it, but there being no notes of hand or, other memoranda to support the claim, it failed.  The moral of which is, that when one loans money to start a bank with, one ought to take the party’s written acknowledgment of the fact.]

CHAPTER LX.

For some days Laura had been a free woman once more.  During this time, she had experienced—­first, two or three days of triumph, excitement, congratulations, a sort of sunburst of gladness, after a long night of gloom and anxiety; then two or three days of calming down, by degrees —­a receding of tides, a quieting of the storm-wash to a murmurous surf-beat, a diminishing of devastating winds to a refrain that bore the spirit of a truce-days given to solitude, rest, self-communion, and the reasoning of herself into a realization of the fact that she was actually done with bolts and bars, prison, horrors and impending, death; then came a day whose hours filed slowly by her, each laden with some remnant, some remaining fragment of the dreadful time so lately ended—­a day which, closing at last, left the past a fading shore behind her and turned her eyes toward the broad sea of the future.  So speedily do we put the dead away and come back to our place in the ranks to march in the pilgrimage of life again.

And now the sun rose once more and ushered in the first day of what Laura comprehended and accepted as a new life.

The past had sunk below the horizon, and existed no more for her; she was done with it for all time.  She was gazing out over the trackless expanses of the future, now, with troubled eyes.  Life must be begun again—­at eight and twenty years of age.  And where to begin?  The page was blank, and waiting for its first record; so this was indeed a momentous day.