ill it better than you."

"Then why am I dismissed?" she asked breathlessly.

The judge looked at her in silence, his blue lips quivering. Sometimes
even he found it hard to tell the truth. And yet he had come to tell
it, that she might suffer less. He remembered the time when Isaac D.
Worthington had done him a great wrong.

"You are dismissed," he said, "because Mr. Worthington has come
home, and because the two other members of the committee are dogs and
cowards." Mr. Graves never minced matters when he began, and his voice
shook with passion. "If Mr. Errol had examined you, and you had your
certificate, it might have been different. Errol is not a sycophant.
Worthington does not hold his mortgage."

"Mortgage!" exclaimed Cynthia. The word always struck terror to her
soul.

"Mr. Worthington holds Mr. Hill's mortgage," said Mr. Graves, more than
ever beside himself at the sight of her suffering. "That man's tyranny
is not to be borne. We will not give up, Cynthia. I will fight him in
this matter if it takes my last ounce of strength, so help me God!"

Mortgage! Cynthia sank down in the chair by the desk. In spite of the
misery the news had brought, the thought that his father, too, who was
fighting Jethro Bass as a righteous man, dealt in mortgages and coerced
men to do his will, was overwhelming. So she sat for a while staring at
the landscape on the old wall paper.

"I will go to Coniston to-night," she said at last.

"No," cried the judge, seizing her shoulder in his excitement, "no. Do
you think that I have been your friend--that I am your friend?"

"Oh, Judge Graves--"

"Then stay here, where you are. I ask it as a favor to me. You need not
go to the school to-morrow--indeed, you cannot. But stay here for a day
or two at least, and if there is any justice left in a free country, we
shall have it. Will you stay, as a favor to me?"

"I will stay, since you ask it," said Cynthia. "I will do what you think
right."

Her voice was firmer than he expected--much firmer. He glanced at her
quickly, with something very like admiration in his eye.

"You are a good woman, and a brave woman," he said, and with this
somewhat surprising tribute he took his departure instantly.

Cynthia was left to her thoughts, and these were harassing and sorrowful
enough. One idea, however, persisted through them all. Mr. Worthington,
whose power she had lived long enough in Brampton to know, was an unjust
man and a hypocrite.