at
times, as if they changed colour with her thoughts? Is it possible that
she could ever love me? If I make a fortune will that bring me any
nearer to her? Obscure as I am my cause is hopeless, but even if I were
rich and powerful, should I ever dare to ascend the steps of that house
where I had once delivered marketing at the kitchen door?"

The memory of the spring morning when I had first gone there with my
basket on my arm returned to me, and I saw myself again as a ragged,
barefooted boy resting beneath the silvery branches of the great
sycamore. Even then I had dreamed of her; all through my life the
thought of her had run like a thread of gold. I remembered her as she
had stood in our little kitchen on that stormy October evening, holding
her mop of a muff in her cold little hands, and looking back at me with
her sparkling defiant gaze. Then she came to me in her red shoes,
dancing over the coloured leaves in the churchyard, and a minute later,
as she had knelt in the box-bordered path patiently building her houses
of moss and stones. As a child she had stirred my imagination, as a
woman she had filled and possessed my thoughts. Always I had seen her a
little above, a little beyond, but still beckoning me on.

The next instant my thoughts dropped back to the evening before, and I
went over word for word every careless phrase she had spoken. Was she
merely kind to the boor in her house? or had there been a deeper meaning
in her divine smile--in her suddenly lifted eyes? "O Ben Starr, you have
won!" she had said, and had the thrill in her voice, the tremor of her
bosom under its fall of lace, meant that her heart was touched? Modest
or humble I had never been. The will to fight--the exaggerated
self-importance, the overweening pride of the strong man who has made
his way by buffeting obstacles, were all mine; and yet, walking there
that morning in the high wind between the rolling broomsedge and the
blood-red sumach, I was aware again of the boyish timidity with which I
had carried my market basket so many years ago to her kitchen doorstep.
She had said of me last night that I was no longer "common." Was that
because she had read in my glance that I had kept myself pure for her
sake?--that for her sake I had made myself strong to resist as well as
to achieve? Would Miss Mitty's or Miss Matoaca's verdict, I wondered,
have been as merciful, as large as hers? "A magnificent animal, but with
no social manner," the v