nd the----"

The Judge looked up: "Of the face?"

"All the flesh tones--especially the tones around the curl where it
lies on the bare shoulder."

He was putting his best foot forward, arguing his side of the case.
Half of Olivia's happiness would be gone if her husband were
disappointed in the portrait.

"Let us go up and look at it," the Judge said, as if impelled by some
sudden resolve.

When he reached the garret--Adam and Olivia and little Phil had gone
ahead--he stopped and looked about him.

"Well, upon my soul! You _have_ turned things upside down," he
remarked in a graver tone. "And here's where you two have spent all
these days, is it?" Again his eye rested on Adam's graceful figure,
whose cheeks were flushed with his run upstairs. With the glance came
a certain feeling of revolt, as if the lad's very youth were an
affront.

"Only in the morning, sir, while the light lasted," explained Adam,
noticing the implied criticism in the coldness of the Judge's tones.

"Turn the picture, please, Mr. Gregg."

For a brief moment the Judge, with folded arms, gazed into the canvas;
then the straight lips closed, the brow tightened, and an angry glow
mounted to the very roots of his gray hair.

"Mr. Gregg," said the Judge in the same measured tone with which he
would have sentenced a criminal, "if I did not know you to be a
gentleman, and incapable of dishonor, I should ask you to leave my
house. You may not have intended it, sir, but you have abused my
hospitality and insulted my home. My wife is but a child, and easily
influenced, and you should have protected her in my absence, as I
would have protected yours. The whole thing is most disturbing,
sir--and I----"

"Why--why--what is the matter?" gasped Adam. The suddenness of the
attack had robbed him of his breath.

"Matter!" thundered the Judge. "Bad taste is the matter, if not worse!
No woman should ever uncover her neck to any man but her husband! You
have imposed upon her, sir, with your foreign notions. The picture
shall never be hung!"

"But it is your own mother's dress," pleaded Olivia, a sudden flush of
indignation rising in her face. "We found it in the trunk. It's on my
bed now--I'll go and get it----"

"I don't want to see it! What my mother wore at her table in the
presence of my father and his guests is not what she would have worn
in her garret day after day for a month with her husband away. You
should have remembered your blood, Olivia