“Oh, if I had met you before! You would have inspired me, uplifted me.”
“No higher than you are.”
“Ah, you don’t understand. I have been so poor.”
“Poverty is not a crime.”
“I have been in prison.”
“You were innocent!” Her face shone.
“It was only for debt. I was the victim of a bankruptcy, and I have paid it all off since. But the stain remains.”
“On the laws that put you there.”
He gulped down the great lump that made his throat dry and painful. “I was born in a poor Nova-Scotian village. No one cared for Art.”
She stooped down and plucked up a sea-pink. “See! how sturdily it grows among the stones!”