ing of that," she declared. "It's Ellie I think of. Her
happiness means more to me than a million dollars would. What I have
told you was in confidence, and, judge, you must treat it so. I beg you,
I demand it of you. You must promise me not to go any further in this.
You must promise me not to tell a living soul what I have told you
to-night. I won't sign any affidavit. I won't sign anything. I won't do
anything to humiliate her. Don't you see, Judge Priest--oh, don't you
see? She feels shame already because she thinks she was humbly born.
She would be more deeply ashamed than ever if she knew how humbly she
really was born--knew that her father was a scoundrel and her mother
died a pauper and was buried in a potter's field; that the name she has
borne is not her own name; that she has eaten the bread of charity
through the most of her life. No, Judge Priest, I tell you no, a
thousand times no. She doesn't know. Through me she shall never know. I
would die to spare her suffering--die to spare her humiliation or
disgrace. Before God's eyes I am her mother, and it is her mother who
tells you no, not that, not that!"

He got upon his feet too. He crumpled the paper into a ball and thrust
it out of sight as though it had been a thing abominable and unclean. He
took no note that in wadding the sheet he had overturned the inkwell and
a stream from it was trickling down his trouser legs, marking them with
long black zebra streaks. He looked at her, she standing there, a
stooped and meager shape in her scant, ill-fitting gown of sleazy black,
yet seeming to him an embodiment of all the beatitudes and all the
beauties of this mortal world.

"Ma'am," he said, "your wishes shall be respected. It shall be ez you
say. My lawyer's sense tells me that you are wrong--foolishly, blindly
wrong. But my memory of my own mother tells me that you are right, and
that no mother's son has got the right to question you or try to
persuade you to do anything different. Ma'am, I'd count it an honor to
be able to call myself your friend."

Already, within the hour, Judge Priest had broken two constant rules of
his daily conduct. Now, involuntarily, without forethought on his part,
he was about to break another. This would seem to have been a night for
the smashing of habits by our circuit judge. For she put out to him her
hand--a most unlovely hand, all wrinkled at the back where dimples might
once have been and corded with big blue veins and sta