"Never mind," said she; "you go ahead with the picture; I'll go alone."
The colonel blessed her, and turned to his picture with a great sigh of relief. Alice left him to prepare for her visit, a flutter of eagerness in her heart, a feeling of timid nervousness which was unaccountable and strange.
She was not accustomed to trembling at the thought of meeting young men. Usually she went forward to the ordeal with a smile, which the victim would not have gathered a great deal of pleasure from, in most cases, if he had been able to read, for he would have seen her appraisement of him on her lips. There was none of this amusing measurement of Joe, no sounding of his shallows with her quick perception like a sunbeam finding the pebbles in the bottom of a brook. There was something in his presence which seemed like a cool wind on the forehead, palpable, yet profound from the mystery of its source.
She had been surprised by the depth of this unpromising subject, to whom she had turned at first out of pity for his mother. The latent beauties of his rugged mind, full of the stately poetry of the old Hebrew chronicles, had begun to unfold to her sympathetic perception in the three visits she had made in her father's company. Each visit had brought some new wonder from that crude storehouse of his mind, where Joe had been hoarding quaint treasures all his lonely, companionless years.
And Joe, even in his confinement, felt that he was free in a larger sense than he ever had been before. He was shaking out his wings and beginning to live understandingly and understood. It was beyond him to believe it sometimes; beyond him always to grasp the reality of Alice Price, and her friendship for one so near the dust as he.
What was there about the poor folks' boy, bound out but yesterday to Isom Chase, and still bound to his estate under the terms of his articles? What was there in him to reach out and touch the sympathies of this beautiful young woman, who came to him with the scent of violets in her hair? Others had despised him for his poverty, and fastened a name upon him which was in itself a reproach. And still misunderstanding, they had carried him off to prison, charged with a dark and hideous crime. Now this light had come to him in his despair, like the beam of that white star above the Judean plains. Like that star, she would stand far off to guide him, and exalt his soul by its strivings to attain her level. There their relations must cease. He might yearn his heart away in the gulf that lay between them, and stretch out his empty hands for evermore, never to feel its nearer warmth upon his breast. He was the poor folks' boy.