uch
the more ridiculous as the Judge prided himself on eschewing all airy
matter, and never mistaking a shadow for a substance. The truth
was,--and it is Phoebe's only excuse,--that, although Judge Pyncheon's
glowing benignity might not be absolutely unpleasant to the feminine
beholder, with the width of a street, or even an ordinary-sized room,
interposed between, yet it became quite too intense, when this dark,
full-fed physiognomy (so roughly bearded, too, that no razor could ever
make it smooth) sought to bring itself into actual contact with the
object of its regards. The man, the sex, somehow or other, was
entirely too prominent in the Judge's demonstrations of that sort.
Phoebe's eyes sank, and, without knowing why, she felt herself blushing
deeply under his look. Yet she had been kissed before, and without
any particular squeamishness, by perhaps half a dozen different
cousins, younger as well as older than this dark-browned,
grisly-bearded, white-neck-clothed, and unctuously-benevolent Judge!
Then, why not by him?

On raising her eyes, Phoebe was startled by the change in Judge
Pyncheon's face. It was quite as striking, allowing for the difference
of scale, as that betwixt a landscape under a broad sunshine and just
before a thunder-storm; not that it had the passionate intensity of the
latter aspect, but was cold, hard, immitigable, like a day-long
brooding cloud.

"Dear me! what is to be done now?" thought the country-girl to herself.
"He looks as if there were nothing softer in him than a rock, nor
milder than the east wind! I meant no harm! Since he is really my
cousin, I would have let him kiss me, if I could!"

Then, all at once, it struck Phoebe that this very Judge Pyncheon was
the original of the miniature which the daguerreotypist had shown her
in the garden, and that the hard, stern, relentless look, now on his
face, was the same that the sun had so inflexibly persisted in bringing
out. Was it, therefore, no momentary mood, but, however skilfully
concealed, the settled temper of his life? And not merely so, but was
it hereditary in him, and transmitted down, as a precious heirloom,
from that bearded ancestor, in whose picture both the expression and,
to a singular degree, the features of the modern Judge were shown as by
a kind of prophecy? A deeper philosopher than Phoebe might have found
something very terrible in this idea. It implied that the weaknesses
and defects, the bad passions,