It was late when the jury returned. The dusty end of day completed their dusty deliberations. They settled down in their seats mopping faces, adjusting waistcoats, casting plausible eyes to the ceiling or doubtful ones to the floor. The foreman, it was evident, felt his brief authority. He was clearly sorry that the waiting crowd had perceptibly diminished. He stood, dyed of mustache, mottled of necktie, his hair brushed in the country barber's idea of integrity and truth. The rendering of the verdict was given with his laborious elegance of diction.

And, suddenly, under even his smug sternness, the dimly lighted building became surcharged with fatal things! The old drama of youth and society, the old tragedy was as evident here as in any Greek theatre set in a hillside. Those who waited greedily for the sentence felt a certain awe as it was given. The Judge's machine-like voice had a cold inexorability, very impressive. It was like a clock ticking out the final words evenly:

"Twenty years at hard labor!"

There was a general intake of breath. To some the sentence was disgracefully light; to others gratifyingly merciful. There was a slow rumble of satisfied country virtue. They looked at the prisoner at the bar. Well, did Terry now know what the law was?

Twenty years at hard labor! Something torturing made Sard's heart careen like a badly ballasted boat. She got her first vision of the enigma of life. But with Terry's sentence were they not all sentenced?

Twenty years at hard labor! Watts working for human betterment, for clearer vision in legal things, yet still under the law. Twenty years at hard labor! Dora, working in the kitchen, always shadowed by her brother's fate. Twenty years at hard labor! Colter patiently striving to piece together his lost puzzled life. Twenty years at hard labor! All the patient workers, thinkers, teachers and trail blazers of the great world! Was Terry in such poor company? Were they not all condemned, all held down, suffocated, frustrated, held back by the blind significance of crystallized laws?

Sard stumbled over to the little group near Terry. Dora, now passionately crying, caught at her hand.

"Dora," Sard's voice weakened in her throat, "Dora, don't cry like that. It isn't only you and Terry, don't you see we are all—all under the law?"

And then the little country court-house became something very terrible to her; she stumbled blindly out of it.

For Sard, poor child, knew that the chief issue, the chief point of all the struggle would be missed. How the trial of Terry O'Brien would be turned by the countryside merely into a compliment for itself! How it would be said that Watts Shipman, the great continental lawyer, had been so impressed by the splendid and inexorable quality of the Trout County Justice, that he had tried one of its most sensational cases himself! How the little country paper would gloat over the thing and fairly tumble over its type as it abandoned its usual clipped stories and boiler press jokes about the mother-in-law, the old maid, the unwelcome twins and the absent husband to flare into three sticks of local felicitations! Veritas, Uncle Felix and E Pluribus Unum would write their usual letters. The Grand Old Man of the town would make a speech and everything he said would later be corrected and contradicted by the three Grand Old Women.

The Roman Holiday furnished by Terry's ruined life would obtain, but there would be no sober effort for the understanding and education of future Terrys.

On the way home Sard and her father drove in silence.

The country roads were leafy tunnels through which the lights of their automobile rayed mysteriously. Owls and bats whirred away from them, mists arose from the flats or filtered through the woods. The Judge held his portfolio of carefully fitted papers. In the dusk Sard saw him heavy, immovable, his cigar in the corner of his mouth. Once or twice he turned to his daughter as if expecting her comment on the day's events. But there was no talk between them and the Judge's face grew harder.

As they entered the drive he waved toward the garage. There gleamed no patch of orange-colored light in the window of the room above; the girl's heart suddenly stood still. As she took her hands from the wheel they trembled.

Again the Judge pointed to the garage. "Leave the car here, don't drive it around; a new man will wash the cars to-morrow. I dismissed Colter this morning."

The Judge did not get down from the car, but sat there smoking and turning his cigar. His gray lips closing on it seemed to be the only thing the girl could look at; she could not look as far as his eyes and the Judge knew that her face became slowly and suffocatingly a scarlet consciousness. He gave a short grunt.

"Exactly; you're not to see him again," he said. Then, "I all but kicked that fellow off the place." As the wild tears rushed to the young eyes: "It's your own behavior, young lady. I've never limited you nor held you back," the Judge said grimly. "I thought you were a lady; I thought you lived under the right laws."

Under the laws——!

Her father did not move from beside her in the seat and Sard dared not press by him out of the driver's seat. She sat, her straight figure dilating, her hands clenched, the red stain on her face seeming to burn down into her body and to make another sort of woman of her—What sort? She could see what sort her father thought she was. The piteous eyes were dense with shame.

At first she thought she could not, must not speak, then a man's kind eyes, understanding, compassionate, rallying, looked again into hers. "Courage!" came Watts' voice. He must have known. The lawyer with his priest's habit of the confessional of reading storm and stress back of faces must have read the new strange agony back of hers.

To do honor to Shipman's belief in her, she must meet this thing calmly and without disrespect or passion. The girl swallowed once; with lifted face, turned on her father a look that might, had he noted it, made him wonder. For the uplifted features were swept clean of resentment. Sard was recognizing the parent's claim on her, trying reasonably to meet it, but the Judge saw only one thing; his hard, old eyes told him he had made his decision just in time and that he must act quickly.

"You—you're letting yourself care for this man." The tones, though not loud, lashed on her; the Judge was deliberately making her ashamed. "I should have thought as my daughter, even if not for yourself, you would have had more pride."

Sard, slowly turning the watch on her wrist round and round, listened. There was only one thing to do, to try to meet the eyes, to meet the accusation with respect. But—but where was the respect due her, to her motives and actions? Had not this man, her own father, been willing to degrade her in her own estimation without hearing her, taking counsel with her?

"Dad," she gave a little helpless shiver, "I don't think you know; you don't understand, or you couldn't say such a thing—as—as that!"

But Bogart, taking out the cigar, smiled at it with a shrewd squint. Well, of course, he did know, and she, this untutored young thing, didn't, that was all!

Sard's father knew what would be the plans of a ne'er-do-well who could make an ardent, indulged young person fall in love with him. "Pah!" The Judge's gorge rose at it, also at what he called Sard's "deceit," it being the means of having him employ this man, rose up and condemned her.

He saw her bowed head in the dusk, the girl's cheek white on her blue scarf, and cleared his throat. "It isn't pleasant," he admitted; then with a rasp, "I never expected to speak to you like this any more than I should expect to thrash Dunstan, but," went on the Judge grimly, "under some circumstances I should take pleasure in doing that very thing. Now stop all this nonsense," he assumed that Sard was crying. "I've had a hard morning," the Judge always saw himself as unnerved by his court-room experiences, "but I'm going to be obeyed."

His hand went out; it clenched on the girl's arm; it was not hurtful, only hard, arresting and cold. "You're to have self-control," said the Judge sharply, "and you're to obey me! Understand?"

But she turned a set and stern face on him. That soft echo of Shipman's "Courage!" had sent the flame of all her ancestors in her. "You are not fair," she stammered. "I am ready to—to"—Sard quivered over the hard word, "obey, but I can't be cut off, dried up, stopped in all that I really care about." She stiffened suddenly, flaring on him with hot mouth. "Oh, you can't be my father, not in spirit, or you wouldn't stand off and judge me, condemn me, like this; you'd help me, you'd be," the tortured girl caught her breath, "a friend; you wouldn't be willing to——"

For answer the Judge rose. He cast an eye to the sky and took out his watch. "You have an aunt," he said sententiously, "a woman, and a lady, to talk things over with." He saw the curling lip of rebellion, adding, "Of course, if you have no use for the society of ladies and social equals, if you care only for gutter snipes and wharf rats, that's your own loss. My business," said the Judge, getting heavily down from the car, "my business is to see that you remember you're my daughter, even if I have to use pretty severe means to make you.... My daughter, flirting with a tramp, making herself the comment of the town and the clubs, is a thing I will not allow!" said the magistrate. "That is a little too low!"

The cheap word "flirting," its hopeless connotation, the inhuman density and commonplace acceptance of the whole matter, seemed to goad Sard into a frenzy.

"Ah, I'm not your daughter," burst out the girl wildly. "I'm not the daughter of coarse, narrow, cruel, smug things."

With the familiar eyes slowly turning on her, with their awful arraignment of her as something vulgar, unworthy, she quivered like a frightened animal. "I don't feel like you—I couldn't! Such disgusting thoughts couldn't stay in my mind—I couldn't be so—so common as you."

It was out now, her condemnation of him. They were pitted against each other, and Sard with a feminine prophetic pang knew to what extent. The only way to influence the Judge would have been her mother's way, the little helpless scented timid lady's way, and the girl knew miserably that hers could never be that way. Yet here she was fighting, not only for her integrity as a dignified woman, but for—for someone who until now, but for her, had been helpless, dazed, a fine sensitive being shut out of all human contacts by his ignorance of what contacts were normally his.

The man turned and faced his daughter; something remorseless came into his eyes. His mouth gripped the cigar. "Either," said the Judge slowly, "either you are my daughter and do as I say, or you don't do as I say—and go——" he muttered doggedly, adding, "I don't care where!"

Then, his eyes professionally piercing, he remarked coolly, over his cigar, "There, that'll do, you've worked yourself up enough, you don't need to be theatrical! Your duty," said the Judge pompously, "is to drop all this poppy-cock about unfortunates, the under-dogs and gutter snipes, whom you affect. Be natural, be normal," said the Judge largely. "Go around with your kind and your own age, though, as far as I can see, they're as addle-pated as yourself. Drop all this nonsense, I say, and don't see Colter again—do you hear?" For the girl, now that he was out of the car, could turn her face from him.

The Judge slowly fulminated, gradually bulged with authority. He seemed solemn even to himself as he laid down his final command. He took the cigar from his mouth. "Don't see Colter again!" His eyes, reading his daughter's, he was looking mercilessly on her young agony, making it naked and flaying it, saw the writhings of her as she took the lash.

Sard made a slow desperate gesture; she had winced, half shrunk from him, but she seemed resolved now to meet the thing in its entirety.

"I'm sorry," said the girl in a low voice, "I can't promise that. Last week, perhaps, but"—with a strange little sigh of inevitability, "not now, Dad. I'm sorry," Sard looked sadly into his face, "I can't promise."

The Judge was stupefied. "Can't promise?" he queried. "Can't promise? But I gave you my orders! Do you realize what you're saying?"

"Courage!" Shipman's low voice, pleading for human understanding, came to her. And another voice, the calm, thoughtful voice of Colter. She saw and recognized instantly her kinship with this soul that had come to her so strangely; she knew that she read it right and that no matter what its oblivion and dismay, it had come to her, belonged to her. Yet with all youth's insecurity and doubt she realized, too, that she could hardly trust herself. Her eyes widened, deepened; with a sudden strange, wild gesture she threw herself forward. Her arms went half-way about her father's neck. "Oh, help me," she begged, "help me! Don't you see that I can't promise? Oh, Father," wept Sard, "why should we two be like this?"

It was perhaps the truest sign, had the girl but known it, of the depth of feeling that had been born in her. When a woman truly loves, her heart goes out to all those with whom she has a relationship under the great new trouble; for her there must be no small meanness, no stabbing dislikes, no impatience. When a woman truly loves, she is tender to the world.

"I can't promise that," the girl wept desperately; "won't you help me, Dad?"

But she might as well have asked help from the automobile. With a strange gesture of disgust and spurning the Judge held her coldly off. What he said was reiterated with majesty. He slowly raised the cigar in his hand and looked at it. Suddenly, with a bitter ejaculation, a short wry shake of the whole body, he flung it away. He passed the slender figure that had thrown itself miserably on the turf at his side and walked rapidly toward the house.

No one saw the Judge that long summer evening; his study was vacant. The talking-machine was silent, his goldfish pool, where he often sat feeding the fishes, was deserted; and yet the whole place, forbidding and shadowed, seemed full of his personality.

So Sard could not go to the house, she could not see Miss Aurelia, discuss the trial, conjecture as to Minga's and Dunstan's whereabouts. The girl, her body aching, her eyes half blind with surging thoughts, wandered to the little fruit orchard. It seemed to her that the gray ancient trees, like good little crones, welcomed her, and that the long grass and the rifts of leaves and patches of starred sky spoke to her. "You are part of us, Sard; we have struggled and fought, too; we have followed instincts and been smitten and wounded. You are like us, Sard, you have come into our laws."

The part of the orchard where the girl threw herself down was dense and deep and its dimness cooled her heart and mind. Concealed from the murmurings of the house and garden, she lay pondering. The kind little old trees mothered her; she opened young eyes and stared pitifully at them, now clenching her hands and softly crying, now softly opening them and shuddering.

"As if I had done something wrong! As if I had done something wrong!"

Her own sentence beat and hammered into Sard's brain until it seemed as if she had done something wrong. So, sometimes, suspicion and influence can put guilt on a clean creature! Under the strange half-awakeness, the half-conscious struggles of a full-grown woman coming to life, before her there suddenly rose the Gorgon face of Society, of the thing called actual life. It turned her young heart and body to stone. The looks and words of Sard's father had been unmistakable; they had made her warm-hearted interest in the Man on the Place, the slow sense of delighted companionship, the mysterious attraction and trust, something shameful!

"As if I had done something wrong! As if I had done something wrong!"

Sard turned miserably, staring up at the sky. With the fairness, the willingness to face things peculiar to her, she could in a measure understand her father's anger and sense of outrage. The girl hardly rebelled against this, unjust as it was, but her helplessness with her own problem, the impossibility of proceeding on this strange and rare path without shame and mud-flinging, for the very path itself became evident to her.

She remembered Miss Aurelia's twittering and misgivings when once or twice she had gone to read with Colter on a bench under the horse-chestnut tree. She remembered Tawny Troop's cheap scorn; she had been "made ashamed."

Even Watts Shipman, it seemed, had had misgivings. He, too, had endeavored to "make her think," and now it was out. There was no hiding it, no possible explanation; she cared for Colter, cared for him with the marvelous gleaming tide, the dewy garden-like rapture, the vivid, etched, romantic stir and storm of a girl's first feeling. It was out; known, discussed, condemned and made shameful. The scarlet flame that had stained Sard's face brought a blazing fire of pride into her heart. Boldly she cast imagination and self-will on this fire of pride.

"I care," she breathed. "I care. It is my life, not theirs! I will go before them all with Colter and say—'I care'!"

The gray twilight grew darker in its language and breathed down to sleep. Roses emptied tiny jars of scent on the night. Lilies burned tall pastilles. Leaves pressed their little hands together in some prayer of darkness. Now and then some small thing like a clock stirred in the long grass near Sard and tried to remind her of time and obligations, but the woe of the whole youthful frame meant nothing to them. They went on in their little ticking way, busy and inevitable.

These things did, however, mean unutterable emotions to the man who came suddenly upon them, who viewed them pitifully in the long grass where long ago the fire-flies had begun to rise and glimmer. To the startled, half-rising girl's face, Colter half groaned. Quickly he tempered his voice and manner. He, it seemed, was in no passion of resentment, and he sought to quell hers.

"I thought I saw you go in here—I waited a long time for you to come out." Colter hesitated. "I wanted to say 'good-bye' before I went. Do you know how late it is?"

For answer she gave a long sigh of relief. "I thought you had gone!" she said. "Is it late?"

The man looked at the girl lying there in the long grass. It was a different Sard Bogart from any he had seen and known since the early spring, since that March day when she had rescued him. He could not look at her thus. Something instinctive and delicate made Colter turn his head away and remain standing. Under the trees he stood immovable, like a statue, thinking with utmost concern upon this prostrate, abandoned grief of youth. He stood, his back to her, looking out toward the slow gathering stars.

His quiet, the absolute calm of him, made Sard wonder. Suddenly she sat up; her hands went to her hair. She was glad he could not see her eyes and wondered if he could have heard her sobbing. Again, inquiringly, she looked at the tall thin form with its broad shoulders and the head, nobly poised, set to a listening attitude.

"If we are very quiet," said Colter at last, "we can hear the wind freshening down the river." Somehow, she knew it was the way he took to quiet her. She was hushed like a storming child.

After a few seconds: "I did not hear you come." She tried to say it naturally, but her relief, the long shuddering sigh, struck into him. The man, his face still turned away, murmured something.

"I did not hear you." Sard rose and went toward him in the dark.

"Perhaps I should not have come," he said. He carefully kept the senses of mistress and employed between them. "But I was very anxious. Shall I go?"

"No." The girl's voice, under his steady leadership, grew clearer. Sard began to get herself together. Here was someone who understood, who needed few words and who, she was convinced, cared. Sard only thought that word "cared." She dared not think the word "love," with its overwhelming waves.

She stood there twisting a piece of grass in nervous fingers. "Father told me!" She said it with a kind of helpless shame. "I am so sorry that you are going, Colter. You seemed so happy lately—and I—I believed that we could help you, take you back to yourself, give you life again."

For answer the man turned and gave her one swift look.

In the summer night Sard saw with wonder that there was a curious competency, a serene purpose in those eyes. In some dumb moment of wild joy she realized that her instinct had taught her true. This was no perplexed "hired man" with no friends nor employment. This was—this was—

"You have helped me more than you know." His voice was grave and restoring. "I have come back further to my own than I dare think of now, and I came by a beautiful path, your sympathy and pure faith. So you must not sorrow like this. You must not distress yourself like this. Things will be clearer."

In the night his clear voice of authority moved the girl strangely. It was an authority and assurance of high character that in her desperately clouded spirit she reached out for. Instinctively, like a wilting plant, the young form straightened and freshened until the man stopped looking at the stars.

He turned toward her and looked long upon the face that had become his star. Colter made a little sorrowful gesture. "I have brought you such pain, and—I can't help!" His hands clenched for a second, the low voice for a second caressed her. "But I will come back if you wish me to. I can promise you to come back."

Her eyes darkened. "Promise!" she bade him fiercely. "Promise——!"

But he was silent. It seemed that he was determined to get Sard out of this mood, to hold her to her best self, the steady clear-sighted self he had seen.

"I do want you to," breathed Sard without shame. "I have grown used to you——" stammering. There was no immediate answer.

She peered at the tall form standing in the summer night almost curiously. They had seemed to change places, Colter and she. Once she had protected, reassured, stimulated and encouraged a weak and sickly man. Now, what was it that encircled, that from his gentle but firmly disciplined presence, dominated her?

"I think you must have grown better, stronger," faltered the girl. She had a kind of childish awe. "You seem different!"

The dark figure moved toward her. "I am different!" He breathed a little more rapidly. "I found a letter—an old letter stuck into a small Greek book I had, and there were names, places that I remembered. It brought back things—people."

The man's voice suddenly sank into a bottomless pit of thronging memories. He stirred, and took a step toward her, holding out his hand. She put hers quickly into it. The ardent, generous action seemed again to make him a man of inflexible control, for he held the hand only a moment, raised it to his lips, kissed it and then gently put it down.

"You have always trusted me? You have always known me?" he asked in a sort of wonder.

"I have always known what you were inside your soul better than you knew yourself," she returned vividly. And as the sensitive long face turned on her, "I knew that you were you."

"If there were time," he answered, "I could tell you what that letter has brought back,—names, events, associations, a college, but which college I don't know, and outside, some sorrowful things, some shadow that brought my Night. What that shadow is I don't know, and until I am sure it is no shadow on my own life I must not come to you, my dear. I mustn't come to you——"

She was silent.

Colter, an indescribable strength on his face, added, "But outside of that, your father thinks, naturally, that I am unworthy, but I am sure I am worthy of you, as worthy as any man may be! Oh, things keep coming back, coming back!"

From the man's voice one could see that these things that came back were a veritable tide of joy and anguish, but that in any case they were life and sanity.

Suddenly, with uncontrolled tenderness, he moved to her side. "Sard, child, you belong to me," he said gently. She could hear this man's breath, his heart plunging in his chest. She almost waited to be swept to him, to be lost in him, but that did not come. Under his voice and look lay judgment, a guidance that calmed all their passion.

Colter took both her hands; he looked into her quivering face. "I was hungry and ye took me in," he said brokenly, "a stranger and ye ministered unto me."

There was a long silence. The crickets clicked their little time devices; the stars were long ropes of flowers; the trees, in great shapes of withheld tenderness, shadowed and shut them in; and in the little gray fruit orchard a girl's spirit felt its wings brush against another spirit. A girl's courage and fineness leaned with a great gratitude against a firmness and fineness greater than its own.