“Gosh hang it! I thought he was one o’ them glass angels stepped out of a church winder over to ’Lizabeth-town. We don’t see them kind much. I wonder now how he’d be to live with. Think I’d feel kinder creepy hevin’ him ’round all time, wouldn’t you?” All the way home the new thought came surging over him, he loved her and she could never be his. It was deluging; it was beautiful; but it was agonizing. He recalled how beautiful she had been as she waved farewell. And some of her smiles had been for him, he was sure. He had known of course that the kisses were for her father, and yet, they had been blown freely his way, and she had looked her pleasure at his presence. There had been a look in her eyes such as she had worn that day in the college chapel when she had thrown precautions to the winds and put her arms about his neck and kissed him. His young heart thrilled with a deep joy over the memory of it. It had been wonderful that she had done it; wonderful! when he was what he was, a _child of the slums_! The words seemed burned upon his soul now, a part of his very life. He was not worthy of her, not worthy to receive her favor. Yet he closed his eyes, leaning his head against the window frame as the train hurried along through the gathering darkness, and saw again the bright lovely face, the dainty fingers blowing kisses, the lips wreathed in smiles, and knew some of the farewell had been surely meant for him. He forgot the beautiful villas along the way, forgot to watch for the twinkling lights, or to care how the cottages looked at evening. Whenever the track veered toward the sea and gave a glimpse of gray sky and yawning ocean with here and there a point of light to make the darkness blacker, he seemed to know instinctively, and opening his eyes strained them to look across it. Out there in the blackness somewhere was his Starr and he might not go to her, nor she come to him. There was a wide stretch of unfathomable sea between them. There would always be that gray, impassable sky and sea of impossibility between them. As he neared New York, however, these thoughts dropped from him; and standing on the ferry-boat with the million twinkling lights of the city, and the looming blackness of the huddled mass of towering buildings against the illuminated sky, the call of the people came to him. Over there in the darkness, swarming in the fetid atmosphere of a crowded court were thousands like himself, yes, _like himself_, for he was one of them. He belonged there. They were his kind and he must help them! Then his mind went to the farm and his plans, and he entered back into the grind of life and assumed its burdens with the sweet pain of his secret locked in his inmost heart. Chapter XIII “Sam, have you ever been in the country?”