seat he pointed out near
the fire. The judge appeared to her to be no older than he had the first
time she had seen him when she went to the probate court with her aunt.
Then he had seemed to her child's eyes an old man, and now he was
indubitably old and rather frail, with a clean-shaven, delicately
moulded chin beneath his white mustache. Adelle was in no hurry to begin
on her errand. She glanced about at the cheerful room with its rows of
old books, presumably the works of those poet friends to whom the judge
could now devote an uninterrupted leisure in communion. She looked at
the old chairs and lounge and mahogany secretary, handed down, no doubt,
from the judge's ancestors, for they antedated even the old judge. And
then, through the little square panes in the windows, out to the
chimney-pots on the slope of the hill, and across the harbor, with its
tangle of wharves and masts, to the bay, through which the ships passed
on into the ocean. She felt that it was exactly the right location for
an old gentleman, who was done with the battles of life and yet wanted
to remain within sight and sound of the battle-field.

The judge, noticing her roving eyes, remarked genially,--"I like to look
out over the place where I have been working so many years!"

"It's nice here," Adelle replied.

There was much more in the room and the house that Adelle vaguely
felt--an air of peace, of gentle and serene contemplation, that came
from the man himself, who had taken what life had offered him and turned
it to good in the alembic of his peculiar nature. It had been a sound
and sweet life, on the whole, and this was a sweet retreat, smelling of
old books and old meetings, fragrant with memories of another world,
another people! This fruit of the spirit, which is all that is left from
living, Adelle could now feel acutely, if she could not express it fitly
in words. And she was grateful for it. She knew that at last she had
come to the right place for the solution of her problem, and she did not
hasten. Neither did the judge hurry her to her errand. Evidently he
recalled who she was, and his keen eyes probably read more of the
secrets of those years since her last appearance in his
court--extravagantly dressed, almost insolent, to listen indifferently
to his severe homily upon Clark's Field--than she suspected. So they
chatted for a few minutes about the view, the city, the old house, and
then, as Adele still seemed tongue-tied, the j