hey can't vote, God bless them!"

"You're welcome to all the good they may bring you, old boy," was
Nicholas's unchivalrous retort.

"Oh, you're jealous, Nick!" twitted Tom gaily. "They don't take kindly
to your carrot locks. Now, I've inherited a way with them, eh, dad?"

The judge complacently buttered his buckwheats. There was a twinkle in
his eyes and a quiver at the corner of his classic mouth.

"It was the only inheritance I wasn't able to squander in my wild oats
days," he returned. "May you cherish it, my boy, as carefully as your
father has done. It would be a dull world without the women."

"And a peaceable one," added Nicholas viciously.

"We owe them much," said the judge, pouring maple syrup from the old
silver jug. "If Helen of Troy set the world at war, she made men
heroes."

"You can't get the pater to acknowledge that the fair things are ever
wrong," put in Tom protestingly. "He would have proved Eve's innocence
to the Almighty. If a woman murdered ten men before his eyes he'd lay
the charge on the devil and acquit her."

The judge shook his head with a laugh.

"I might merely argue that the queen can do no wrong," he suggested.

When Tom had finished his breakfast, Nicholas walked with him to his
office, and, seeing Bessie Pollard, red-eyed and drooping in her
father's door, he lingered an instant and held out his hand. There was
defiant sympathy in his act--disdain of the judgment of
Kingsborough--and of General Battle, who was passing--and pity for a
bruised common thing that looked at him with beautiful, mindless eyes.

"You aren't looking bright to-day," he said kindly, "but things will
pull through, never fear--they always do, if you give them time."

Then he responded coolly to the general's cool nod, and, rejoining Tom,
they went on arm in arm. In his large-minded manhood it had not occurred
to him to connect the girl with the wrong done upon him--he knew her to
be more weak than wicked, and, in her soft, pretty sadness, she reminded
him of a half-drowned kitten.

During the next few months he frequently passed Eugenia in the road.
Sometimes he did not look at her, and again he met her wistful gaze and
spoke without a smile. Once he checked an eager movement towards her
because he had met Bernard just ahead--and he hated him; once he had
seen the carriage in the distance and had waited in a passionate rush
of remorse and love to hear her laughter as she talked with Dudley Webb.
Th