must have looked suddenly taller.

Mr. Burr was facing an unmistakable crisis, with no time to wonder how
long it had been forming, or why. He hurried after the boy and caught
him fiercely if ineffectively by the arm.

"You can't go in there," stated Mr. Burr arbitrarily, all logic
deserting him. "You can't. You don't know----"

"Oh, I'm not going to knife the Judge," his client explained kindly.
"I'm only going to find out what's back of this."

"Take it quietly," was the ill-chosen sentiment which suggested itself
to Mr. Burr. Neil Donovan swung round angrily, and paused to reply to
it, with fires which the somewhat negative though offensive personality
of the pink young man could never have kindled alight in his brown eyes.

"Quietly? There's been too much of that in this town. I'm sick of it.
The only friend I've got who hasn't got one foot in the gutter goes back
on me for no reason at all, the first time I ask a favour of him that
don't amount to picking his pockets. The only big man in this rotten
town who's halfway straight since Everard turned the town rotten begins
to act like he wasn't straight. What's back of it? I'm going to know.
Get out of my way, Theodore."

"You don't know who's in there."

"I don't care. I'm going to know." Disposing of the hovering and anxious
intervention of Mr. Burr, and throwing the door open, he slammed it in
the pink young man's perturbed face, and stepped alone out of the
sunshine into the Judge's dim little inner office.

The Judge's friendly littered little room was not so inviting in working
hours as it was in the hospitable hours of late afternoon. It was like a
woman seen in evening dress by daylight. But the boy who had invaded it
so hotly unmasked no conspiracy here. The men at the table near the one
window, with a pile of official but entirely innocent looking papers
between them, had every right to be there. They were the Judge and
Colonel Everard.

The great man looked quite undisturbed by the boy's invasion, glancing
up at him indifferently from the papers that he was turning over with
his finely moulded, delicately used hands; he even looked mildly amused,
but the boy turned to him first instinctively, and not to the Judge, who
was peering at him with troubled and kindly eyes over the top of his
glasses.

"I've got to speak to the Judge. I'm sorry."

He stammered out his half-apology awkwardly enough, but the smouldering
fires were still alight in his br