Alice stood through the judge’s lecture unflinchingly. Her face was pale, for she realized the enormity of her transgression, but there was neither fear nor regret in her heart. She met the judge’s eyes with honest courage, and bowed her head in acknowledgment of his leniency when he dismissed her. 299
From her seat she smiled, faintly above the tremor of her breast, to Joe. She was not ashamed of what she had done, she had no defense to make for her words. Love is its own justification, it wants no advocate to plead for it before the bar of established usage. Its statutes have needed no revision since the beginning, they will stand unchanged until the end.
The prosecuting attorney had seen his castle fall, demolished and beyond hope of repair, before a charge from the soft lips of a simple girl. Long and hard as he had labored to build it up, and encompass Joe within it, it was in ruins now, and he had no heart to set his hand to the task of raising it again that day. He asked for an adjournment to morning, which the weary judge granted readily.
People moved out of the room with less haste and noise than usual, for the wonder, and the puzzle, of what they had heard and seen was over them.
What was the aim of that girl in shutting that big, gangling, raw-boned boy’s mouth just when he was opening it to speak, and to speak the very words which they had sat there patiently for days to hear? What was he to Alice Price, and what did she know of the secret which he had been keeping shut behind his stubborn lips all that time? That was what they wanted to know, and that was what troubled them because they could not make it out at all.
Colonel Price made his way forward against the outpouring stream to Alice. He adjusted her cloak around her shoulders, and whispered to her. She was very pale still, but her eyes were fearless and bright, and they followed Joe Newbolt with a tender caress as the sheriff led him out, his handcuffs in his pocket, the prisoner’s long arms swinging free.
Ollie and her mother were standing near Colonel Price and Alice, waiting for them to move along and open the passage to the aisle. As Alice turned from looking after Joe, the 300 eyes of the young women met, and again Ollie felt the cold stern question which Alice seemed to ask her, and to insist with unsparing hardness that she answer.
A little way along Alice turned her head and held Ollie’s eyes with her own again. As plain as words they said to the young widow who cringed at her florid mother’s side:
“You slinking, miserable, trembling coward, I can see right down to the bottom of your heart!”
Joe returned to his cell with new vigor in his step, new warmth in his breast, and a new hope in his jaded soul. There was no doubt now, no groping for a sustaining hand. Alice had understood him, and Alice alone, when all the world assailed him for his secret, and would have torn it from his lips in shame. She had given him the sympathy, for the lack of which he must have fallen; the support, for the want of which he must have been lost.