re battling with him
over politics and jurisprudence as they had in past days. The day I went
into his library to ask father about employing another likely black
garden boy that Dabney had discovered, and found him, Judge Monfort from
over at Hillcrest in the third district, Mr. Cockrell and Mr. Sproul
around his table deep in huge volumes from the shelves, buried in a
cloud of tobacco smoke and argument in which Latin words flew back and
forth, I went up to my room and stood helpless before my window looking
out towards Paradise Ridge.

"I want to thank somebody and there is nobody to thank," I whispered,
with a great emptiness within me. That was the bitterest cry of need my
heart had ever given forth, and I went swiftly down to Nickols in the
garden and told him what I had seen and heard.

"It really is a remarkable come-back, sweetheart," he said, with the
most exquisite sympathy in his voice and face. "Mark Morgan told me just
an hour ago that they want to have him appointed back to his old place
on the bench and Mr. Cockrell answered the President's inquiry for a man
from this section for the Commerce Commission with the judge's name.
It'll be great to see the old boy on one of the seats of the mighty
again, thanks to the sweat of his brow and mind in this village
manifestation of American nationalism which has grown out of our little
old garden plan."

"What can a man or woman do to render gratitude if there seems to be
nobody to take it, Nickols?" I asked him, not expecting, as usual, that
he would understand me. For once he did.

"The philosophies all teach 'hand it on' in that case," he answered me.

"I'll hand it on to Martha Ensley and help her and her child to their
place under the sun," I said slowly, thus by having a reason and an
obligation back of it, ratifying the vow I had already taken.

"That is an impossibility," answered Nickols with easy coolness. "The
one 'come-back' that is impossible is the woman in that kind of a
situation."

"I'll never admit such an injustice as that," I said, and I had a queer
premonition that I would be held to that declaration.

The very next morning after my declaration of purpose to "hand on" my
father's "come-back" I went down into the Settlement to hunt for Martha
Ensley, not that I was really suffering about her, but because I felt a
kind of obligation to begin at once a thing that it appealed to my sense
of justice to accomplish.

Sometimes in mid-August