of sending for
the mason the next morning and before her husband confessing her useless
secret, and then briefly she spoke of the subsequent steps that had
brought her to the city to see the Washington Trust Company.

"And they told you?" queried the judge, leaning forward to poke the coal
fire into flame.

"They said that nothing could be done now for these California Clarks,
because it would make a lot of trouble and harm innocent people to go
back of the new titles to the property," Adelle replied.

"And they were perfectly right," Judge Orcutt said, with a long sigh,
after a moment of consideration. "It was the only thing they could say
to you!"

He went into the law of it and explained to Adelle, more clearly than it
had ever been done, just how the uncertain title had finally been
"quieted," all the legal steps which had been duly taken to notify the
unknown heirs, and the judicial sale ordered by the court, with the
meaning of the process.

"So you can see that the law took great pains to find these people, and
make sure that no wrong should be done to any rightful claimants, and
because it failed to find the lost heirs there is no reason why people
who bought the land in good faith should be made to suffer. You see?"

Adelle saw, but she was disappointed. It was the same thing the trust
company had said to her, only now she felt sure of it. What could she
say to her young cousin? That troubled her a great deal. She hated to
disappoint his expectations, which she had ignorantly aroused.

"And the law is right," the old judge mused aloud, "whatever hardship it
may seem to work to these unknown heirs like your California cousins.
For you must see that human life could not go on unless we cleaned the
slate sometimes arbitrarily, and began all over. It is better for
everybody to accept certain inexact or unjust conditions rather than to
disturb the whole fabric of human society by attempting to do exact
justice, which, after all, is in itself a human impossibility. That is
what our good people, reformers and anarchists alike, often fail to
understand!... So these Clarks, I am afraid, will have to suffer for the
carelessness of their ancestor in not leaving his address behind him
when he left for the West. No court would open up the old tangle about
Clark's Field now that it has been finally adjudicated according to due
process of law. No court would order the case reopened--it is _res
judicata_, fixed unalter