He rose.
“You will come and see me again soon—will you not?” she said.
“As often as you please, ma'am; I am your servant.”
“Then come to-morrow.”
He went on the morrow, and the next day, and the day after—almost every day while Dawtie was waiting her trial.
Almost every morning Alexa went by train to see Dawtie; and the news she brought, Andrew would carry to the girl's parents. Dawtie continued unwilling to see Andrew: he had had trouble enough with her already, she said; but Andrew could not quite understand her refusal.
CHAPTER XXXIII. A GREAT OFFERING.
Two days before the assizes, Andrew was with Alexa in her parlor. It was a cool autumn evening, and she proposed they should go on the heath, which came close up to the back of the house.
When they reached the top of the hill, a cold wind was blowing, and Andrew, full of care for old and young, man and woman, made Alexa draw her shawl closer about her throat, where, with his rough, plow-man hands, he pinned it for her. She saw, felt, and noted his hands; a pitying admiration, of which only the pity was foolish, woke in her; and ere she knew, she was looking up in his face with such a light in her eyes that Andrew found himself embarrassed, and let his fall. Moved by that sense of class-superiority which has no place in the kingdom of heaven, she attributed his modesty to self-depreciation, and the conviction rose in her, which has often risen in such as she, that there is a magnanimity demanding the sacrifice, not merely of conventional dignity, but of conventional propriety. She felt that a great lady, to be more than great, must stoop; that it was her part to make the approach which, between equals, was the part of the man; the patroness must do what the woman might not. This man was worthy of any woman; and he should not, because of the humility that dared not presume, fail of what he deserved!