She had given him
food. She had said he was no thief. It all came back to him. He had
looked upon her as an angel then--a strange, unfamiliar angel in the
garb she wore, but an angel, just the same.
Now he knew that love began with the first glimpse he had of her. It
was as if she had been revealed to him in a vision. His mind swept
along over the rough days that followed. He saw her again in the ring,
in the dressing-tent--everywhere. Then there was that night under the
grocer's awning--that sweetest of all nights in his life!
And now she was here, with him again, but amidst vastly different
surroundings. She was here, and she would need him now as he had
needed her then. It was for him now to present himself as the bulwark
between her and the fickle, disdainful world of which she had become a
part. She was no longer the self-reliant, petted creature of the
circus, where environment and adversity formed a training-school for
disaster, but a delicate, refined flower set out in a new soil to
thrive or wither as the winds of prejudice blow. In the other days she
could have laughed with glee at the vagaries of that self-same wind,
but now, ah, now it was different.
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