Page:Frank Packard - Greater Love Hath No Man.djvu/151

 Rand, his new guard as the warden laughingly called her, who had brought the change to pass. Much through the day they were together, and her clear, ringing laugh, her rich, full voice seemed like strains of some divine melody that stirred a joyous echo in his own soul. At first, it had been as though he listened to it as one who had no right to listen, as one for whom it was not meant, as a thief who steals, or an interloper who intrudes—a strange barrier that his own, fine supersensitiveness raised. But gradually her frank, open, unaffected attitude toward him had quietly, almost unconsciously swept this aside, and in its place had come a friendly intimacy, a certain comradeship that he cherished and treasured in his heart as a priceless possession.

And so a week had passed, the happiest week he had known in weary months: and now in the fresh, cool, early morning he was beginning another day's work. From the conservatory at the rear of the house and behind the barn he wheeled his barrow, loaded with potted plants, to the lower end of the lawn where a bed had been prepared for their transplanting. He set the wheel-barrow down and for a moment, his back deliberately turned to the grey prison walls, he stood erect and motionless, gazing about him into the cloudless blue overhead, at the fields and farms that flanked the village road, at the village itself—a straggling, double row of cottages that terminated at the bridge over the little creek a quarter of a mile away, where the sawmill, the blacksmith shop and the general store were grouped together. Freedom, blessed freedom, manhood's inheritance! This much at least was his—to look and feast his eyes and, yes, if he would—to dream.