furthest
man in the crowd; tall, well-built, oval-faced, commanding--a judge
every inch of him, even if a young judge--was Tom Van Dorn. And when he
had finished speaking at the Harvest Home Picnic, or at the laying of
the corner stone of the new Masonic Temple, or at the opening of the
Grant County fair, men said:

"Well, I know they say Tom Van Dorn is no Joseph, but all the same I'm
here to tell you--" and what they were there to tell you would
discourage ladies and gentlemen who believe that material punishments
always follow either material or spiritual transgressions.

So the autumn wore into winter, and the State Bar Association promoted
Judge Van Dorn; he appeared as president of that dignified body, and
thereby added to his prestige at home. He appeared regularly at church
with Mrs. Van Dorn--going the rounds of the churches punctiliously--and
gave liberally when a subscription paper for any cause was presented.
But for all this, he kept hearing the bees of gossip buzzing about him,
and often felt their sting.

Day after day, through it all he never slept until in some way, by some
device, through some trumped up excuse that seemed plausible enough in
itself, he had managed to see and speak to Margaret Fenn. Whether in her
office in the Light, Heat & Power Company's building upon a business
errand, and he made plenty of such, or upon the street, or in the court
house, where she often went upon some business of her chief, or walking
home at evening, or coming down in the morning, or upon rare occasions
meeting her clandestinely for a moment, or whether at some social
function where they were both present--and it of necessity had to be a
large function in that event--for the town could register its
disapproval of the woman more easily than it could put its opprobrium
upon the man; or whether he spoke to her just a word from the sidewalk
as he passed her home, always he managed to see her. Always he had one
look into her eyes, and so during all the day, she was in his thoughts.
It seems strange that a man of great talents could keep the machinery of
his mind going and still have an ever present consciousness of a guilty
intrigue. Yet there it was. Until he had seen her and spoken to her, it
was his day's important problem to devise some way to bring about the
meeting. So with devilish caution and ponderous circumlocution and craft
he went about his daily work, serene in the satisfaction that he was
being succes