rasping the arms of his chair,
the newspaper behind his heels, his straw hat and cane on the floor
at his side, and beside them the bulldog--his nose thrust against
the hat.

Barbee was leaning over his desk with his fingers plunged in his
hair and his eyes fixed on the law book before him--unopened. He
turned and remarked with dry candor:

"Marguerite has dropped me."

"If she has, it's a blessed thing."

"There was more depth to her than I thought."

"There always is. Wait until you get older."

"I shall have to work and climb to win her."

"You might look up meantime the twentieth verse of the twenty-ninth
chapter of Genesis."

Barbee rose and took down a Bible from among the law books: it had
been one of the Judge's authorities, a great stand-by for reference
and eloquence in his old days of pleading. He sat down and read
the verse and laid the volume aside with the mere comment: "All
this time I have been thinking her too much of a child; I find that
she has been thinking the same of me."

"Then she has been a sound thinker."

"The result is she has wandered away after some one else. I know
the man; and I know that he is after some one else. Why do people
desire the impossible person? If I had been a Greek sculptor and
had been commissioned to design as my masterwork the world's Frieze
of Love, it should have been one long array of marble shapes, each
in pursuit of some one fleeing. But some day Marguerite will be
found sitting pensive on a stone--pursuing no longer; and when I
appear upon the scene, having overtaken her at last, she will sigh,
but she will give me her hand and go with me: and I'll have to
stand it. That is the worst of it. I shall have to stand it--that
she preferred the other man."

The Judge did not care to hear Barbee on American themes with Greek
imagery. He yawned and struggled to his feet with difficulty.
"I'll take a stroll," he said; "it is all I can take."

Barbee sprang forward and picked up for him his hat and cane. The
dog, by what seemed the slow action of a mental jackscrew, elevated
his cylinder to the tops of his legs; and presently the two stiff
old bodies turned the corner of the street, one slanting, one
prone: one dotting the bricks with his three legs, the other with
his four.

Formerly the man and the brute had gone each his own way, meeting
only at meal time and at irregular hours of the night in the
Judge's chambers. The Judge had his stories