"Can you give me five dollars of that in gold?" he asked of the cashier when his turn finally came. With a nod of assent, the cashier counted out several small bills, and laid a shining five-dollar gold piece on top. Alec seized it eagerly and, thrusting the bills into his pocket, walked out with the coin in his hand.
Long ago he had decided how to spend his first surplus five dollars if it came in time. It should go as a happy surprise to Flip on her sixteenth birthday. It had come in time. Her birthday was on the twenty-first of the month. At first he thought he could not wait three long weeks before sending it. He wanted her to have the pleasure and surprise of receiving it at once; and he wanted the thrill of feeling that he was man enough not only to be self-supporting, but to help care for his sister.
He wrapped the coin in a bit of tissue-paper, torn from the shaving-case Flip had sent him in the delayed Christmas box. Then he carefully put it in the inner pocket of the old wallet he carried. But scarcely a night passed between that time and the twentieth that he did not take a peep at the coin, and then count the days on his calendar.
Ever since the night of the praise service, when he first heard Avery Windom sing, he had been a regular attendant at the Christian Endeavour meetings. It was like a bit of home to sit there in the midst of the young people, singing the familiar old hymns, and he sang them so heartily and entered into the exercises of the meeting with such zest that he soon lost the feeling that he was only a stranger within the gates.
There were some, it is true, who were only coolly polite to him, thinking of his position, an unknown boy working in the shoe factory as a common labourer. He felt the chill of their manner keenly, and he knew why he was so pointedly ignored. It was not a deeply spiritual society. Only a few of the members were really consecrated Christians. There were more socials and concerts and literary evenings than devotional meetings. Most of the members belonged to old, wealthy families, and had always been accustomed to leisure and pocket-money. Alec soon realized the bounds that were set to his social privileges. He might take a prominent part in the meetings, even be asked to lead on occasions, be put on committees, be assigned many tasks in connection with suppers and festivals, but outside of his church relationship he was never noticed. No hospitable home swung open its doors for him.
Only one who has lived in a country place, which knows no class distinctions, where character is all that counts, and where the butcher and baker may be bidden any day, in simple village fashion, to banquet with the judge, only such an one can understand the feeling of a boy in Alec's position. He wondered sometimes, with a sudden sinking of the heart, what would be the result if they knew about his father.
He never looked at Avery Windom without thinking of it. He used to watch her in church, sitting up between her aristocratic father and mother, sweet and refined, like a dainty white flower. He wondered if her slim-gloved hand would ever be held out to him again in greeting, as it had been on several occasions, if she knew that he was the son of a criminal.
Then he wondered what she would think if she knew that the touch of that little hand in his had been like the saving touch of a guardian angel. Once, urged on by one of the factory boys, an almost overwhelming temptation had seized him, but the remembrance that if he yielded he would never again be fit to take her hand made him thrust his into his pockets and turn away toward home with a shrug of the shoulders.