“I must go now,” said she, soft and low and in steady voice. “Good-bye.”
She gave him her hand, and he clung to it like a nestling fastening upon the last branch interposing between it and destruction.
“I forgot where I was,” said he weakly, his shaken mind incapable of comprehending things as they were, his abasement over the breach that he had committed being so profound. She withdrew her hand. When it was gone out of his, he remembered how warm it was with the tide of her young body, and how soft for his own work-roughened fingers to meet and enfold.
“I must go now,” said she again. Her feet sounded in the corridor as she ran away. A little way along she stopped. She was beyond his sight, but her voice sounded near him when she called back “Good-bye!”
She had not gone in anger nor displeasure, thought he, getting hand of his confused senses after a while, standing as she had left him, the flowers in his hand. Strangely exulting, strangely thrilling, mounting a moment like an eagle, plunging down now like a stone, Joe walked his cell.
What had he done, drawn on by that which he had read in her eyes in that poignant moment! In jail, locked behind a grated door of steel, he had taken her hand and drawn her to him until the shock of the bars had called back his manhood. He had taken advantage of her friendship and sympathy.
Prison was no place for love; a man locked in jail charged with a crime had no right to think of it. It was base of him, and unworthy. Still–mounting again in a swift, delicious 226 flight–it was sweet to know what her eyes had told him, sweeter to rest assured that she had not left him in scorn. Down again, a falling clod. Unless he had misinterpreted them in the ignorance of his untutored heart. Yet, that is a language that needs no lexicon, he knew.
Who is so simple, indeed, as to be unaware of that? How different this passion from that which Ollie’s uncovered bosom had stirred; how he burned with shame at the memory of that day!
Up and down he strode the morning through, his long, thin legs now spare in his boot-tops, his wide, bony shoulders sharp through his coat. The strong light fell on his gaunt face as he turned toward the window; shadows magnified its hollows when he turned toward the door. Now that the panic of it had left him, the sweetness of it remained.
How soft her hand was, how her yielding body swayed in his arm! How delicious her breath was on his face; how near her eyes, speaking to him, and her lips; how near her parted, warm, red lips!