ded him in his admission
that they had been treating Joe Newbolt shamefully. Of course the
sheriff was partly to blame for that, having set himself up with
metropolitan importance, now that he was secure in office. He had put
aside Wednesday as the one day of the week on which visitors, other than
relatives or counsel of prisoners, would be permitted to enter the
jail.

It chanced to be a Wednesday morning when the colonel got around to it
finally, and they agreed heartily and warmly that somebody ought to go
and carry a little gleam of cheer and encouragement to Joe. The colonel
looked at his unfinished picture, then at the mellow light of the autumn
day, so much like the soul of corn itself, and then at Alice. He lifted
his eyebrows and waved his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

"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