In Roseborough, as has been remarked, Judge Giffen was universally listed by the adjective “imposing.” Those spinsters with clinging natures preferred to describe him as “authoritative.” Miss Palametta Watts, who was suspected (to put it mildly) of special leanings—not to say intentions—in his direction, called him “masterful.” Quite recently Miss Palametta had boldly charged him with this trait; and, with the daring of desperate thirty-seven, had asked him if she were not correct in deducing from his stern mien that his wife, when he selected one, would be constrained to obey him; for her own part she knew she would.

“Such is the scriptural injunction,” he pronounced after weighing the matter; but, to her disappointment, pursued the subject no further. To be sure, not having his glasses on at the time, he may not have seen her inviting looks.

Mrs. Witherby’s dicta were taken as final in Roseborough, for it was conceded that she had “a wonderful way of expressing herself,” and Mrs. Witherby had a vast admiration for Judge Giffen and frequently summed him up thus: “Well, it may be true that the Judge has had more decisions reversed than any other judge in the land, and that but for Hibbert Mearely’s influence he would never have been a judge at all; but what I always say is, ‘Where in all Roseborough (or elsewhere, either, for the matter of that) will you find a man who has such an air about him?’ Judge Giffen is a gentleman who understands his own worth. One can see that at a glance.”

One could see it at a glance this afternoon as he rode forward. It was emphatically a man with a fine understanding of his own worth whom the large, flea-bitten white horse brought to pause at Villa Rose’s gate. Though above medium stature, he was still not so tall as he appeared, from the height of his collar and the lofty manner of carrying his head. It was this last habit in particular, no doubt, which gave him the “air” so much admired.

His hair was graying with an even pepper-and-salt sprinkling. He allowed it to grow long in front, that his small, square forehead might be ornamented with a “statesman’s lock.” His eyes were small and brown and of no marked luminosity or keenness; his pepper-and-salt eyebrows were short and highly peaked at the outer corners—a sign, phrenologists declare, of latent ferocity. Doubtless the eyebrows assisted Miss Palametta Watts to her definition of “masterful.” He wore a short-cropped moustache naturally, and affected an imperial and goatee. His morals, of course, like all Roseborough morals, were above reproach. His hobbies were chess and the Weekly Digest, which gave him the news of the world in twelve pages of small paragraphs with inserts of verse, fiction, humour, publisher’s advertisements, and editorials on all world-wide topics, from single tax to the Oriental problem and back by way of the clam middens of British Columbia to the Greek schism and free verse. By lingering and studious perusal, he managed to make each week’s Digest last until the post brought the next.

For the rest, he dwelt in apartments in the house of a Mrs. Taite, a gentlewoman fallen into adverse circumstances, who was willing to take in and care for a paying guest in order to eke out. He lived in an economical and dignified style, and kept two horses, on the means which could very much better have been applied to the purchase of a neat cottage to shelter a wife. At least such was the opinion of Roseborough’s spinsters.

Perhaps the Judge did not treat the Roseborough spinsters quite fairly. The legal mind, by reason of its professional habits, becomes versed in subtleties, evasions, and the like—“technicalities” as they are called. The judge’s apartments were sincerely and solidly furnished by Mrs. Taite; but they were decorated with technicalities and evasions. In this wise: on the slippery horsehair sofa (supplied by Mrs. Taite) there was a row of cushions contributed by hungry hearts. They were stuffed with rags, excelsior, goose feathers, or ducks’ down, according to the financial rating of Miss Hopeful; and covered with crochet, tatting, crazy-quilt patches, sampler, or crewel work, according to her taste and her proficiency with the embroidery needle, the bobbin, or the small steel hook. One sampler-topped pillow bore the legend, tidily cross-stitched in a circle: “When here you rest your weary head, dream of the Giver.” The Judge had accepted the cushion and highly complimented the workmanship, vaguely maundered on the sweet thoughts that natively abide in woman’s breast, and set the pillow at the foot of the sofa. As his stockinged or slippered pedal extremities were not dreamers, he could use the gift without troubling his weary head about the giver. Thus, it will be seen, that the learned jurist could appropriate the soft advantages of a tentative contract, and escape the expected payment on a technicality, as well as any man he ever solemnly upbraided in court for the same act.

“I know what I should like to do with these rooms,” Miss Hopeful would say, with arch looks.

The Judge would answer promptly:

“What, for instance?”

He was, in his way, a shrewd man as a man who knows a trifle about horses is apt to be. He asked purposely, because, since the spinsters of Roseborough were each and all “homey” women, domestic by training, he had found that their suggestions, when followed out, added to the comfort of his bachelor life.

Encouraged by his receptivity, the lady would express her idea and even offer to come and assist “dear Mrs. Taite” in putting it into effect. More than one damsel had spent her half hour mounted on a kitchen stool, with her mouth full of tacks, while dear Mrs. Taite handed the hammer back and forth and made mental note of defects in the aspirant’s figure to retail later to the judge, who liked what he called “a well-turned woman.” To retain her paying guest was Mrs. Taite’s life-work.

To tell the truth, the Judge had been in no haste to woo. He was not touched with Romeo’s fever. His temperament was judicial and calm. He was—it may again be remarked—shrewd. He knew to a penny exactly what his monthly income could do for him in the way of providing a Roseborough gentleman’s requisites, and he was in little danger of deliberately seeking to curtail his small personal luxuries by taking a dowerless wife. So he listened the more appreciatively to his landlady’s analyses of the dispositions and physical characteristics of Roseborough’s spinsters. “Knowledge is power,” he would aver with a solemn sort of waggishness, when she had permitted him to gather, from her discourse, that there was not an ankle among the lot which would dare show itself in a plain white stocking; or that a certain melting-eyed one’s shoulder blades or hip bones were “at least no sharper than her temper.” He knew from other of Mrs. Taite’s hints—dropped generally while stirring a hot cup of chocolate for his nightcap and buttering a toasted scone to accompany it, that some young ladies who owned to twenty-six would never see thirty-three again, and that a baby-waisted white muslin frock was no longer the badge of a guileless heart, as it had been in the days when she wore one to induce that maiden’s shock, the first kiss.

What with Mrs. Taite’s chocolate and subtlety and the judge’s legal technicalities, it will be seen that the Roseborough spinsters were out-generalled. They had once been a threat; but, nowadays, there was scarcely the aroma of danger surrounding them. Mrs. Taite felt that the menace to her came from another quarter. It had (as she mentally phrased it) “struck upon her bosom and fairly winded her” one evening when Judge Giffen had remarked, between chocolate sips, that Mrs. Mearely had received him that afternoon in a black-and-white striped gown. Unlike Mr. Albert Andrews, the Judge rather prided himself on having an eye for feminine apparel.

“And she looked uncommonly well in it, too,” he added. “A very well-turned woman is Mrs. Mearely. Yes, Mrs. Taite, I believe poor dear Mearely’s taste to have been as infallible in that case as in every other.”

“Mr. Hibbert Mearely had the large means necessary to indulge a woman of such extravagant fancies.” In Mrs. Taite’s voice there was a tremolo as she shot the only dart she could find at that moment, knowing, alas, that it was unbarbed save to her own heart.

“And now she has the means, and none to please but herself.”

The landlady attempted to retrieve her error.

“Considering her humble origin, I should hope she’d spend her life henceforth as an offering to her distinguished husband’s memory.” This conversation had taken place on a winter’s evening, but that was not the reason why Mrs. Taite’s teeth chattered.

“Ah, no doubt—for a year or so. Mearely, himself, was a great stickler for form, and he trained her in the niceties of observance. Her origin—that is to say, the butter pats and so on—is a forgotten myth in Roseborough now.”

“Among the men, perhaps.”

“A forgotten myth, Mrs. Taite. Mearely put the quietus on it by his will. He left her everything. I drew it up, you know. Yes; he was in the pink of condition at the time—the very pink. Whoever thought he would go to his last account not three months later?” He mused on this so long that Mrs. Taite, anxious to get to the terms of the will and learn the worst she had to fear, put in a remark to bring him back to the theme.

“Cholera Morpheus, was it not?”

“Morbus, Mrs. Taite, morbus—a latin word meaning—er. Yes. Poor dear Mearely said to me: ‘I am a healthy man and the Mearelys are a long-lived family. I except to see ninety and bury my wife a dozen years earlier, as my grandfather did before me. However, we are all mortal and subject to climate and accident. I may die to-morrow and leave Mrs. Mearely a widow. I wonder, ought I make the proviso that she must lose all my fortune, if she marries again? What would you advise?’”

“And what did you advise, Judge Giffen?” Mrs. Taite trembled.

“Ah, a really remarkable thing! I advised against it, and he didn’t do it.”

“What a calamity!” Mrs. Taite cried out in spite of herself, and hastened to add: “Leaving her at the mercy of fortune hunters.”

“I said that, in the very unlikely event of her being left a young widow, it would be better that she should have the responsibility of living up to the Mearely name and estate. This duty would guide her choice in re-marriage. Whereas, without responsibilities, she might hark back to the farm strain and contract a union which would be a slur on the Mearely honour. He perceived the point, and, after providing for a few bequests to relatives, he left her everything, on condition that she continued to live in Villa Rose. ‘For,’ said he, ‘I won’t have her running up and down Europe, spending money to fatten a conscienceless army of waiters, guides, and concierges. Let her remain quietly at home and continue to carry out my artistic scheme, as the one rustic and indigenous object of beauty in the midst of my priceless antiques and objets d’art.’ That was his idea. A very superior man—was my dear friend, Mearely.”

“So Mrs. Mearely has control of her fortune and is obliged to live in Roseborough? Then she is compelled to choose a man from these parts.”

“Yes. If she leaves Villa Rose and Roseborough, she loses everything. Yes, it was I who drew up that will, Mrs. Taite. I relate the facts to you now in strict confidence, relying on your discretion. You have been my confidante for a number of years, Mrs. Taite, and I believe there is no woman in Roseborough so discreet.”

Whereupon, Mrs. Taite had besought him to continue this reliance, as no word of his confidences had ever passed, or should ever pass, her lips; but she believed that the will’s terms were not unknown in Roseborough; she had heard rumours, indeed, though she had not credited them. Perhaps, she thought, Mr. Howard, being a distant cousin of Mr. Mearely’s, had felt privileged to inform Roseborough. On the contrary, the Judge argued, Mr. Howard had known nothing of this proviso. He was sure of that.

“Poor Howard would have been left out entirely but for me. I got his little legacy for him. So much per year, you know—just enough to keep him, if prices don’t soar. I pointed out to Mearely that Howard is really an excellent chess player.”

Mrs. Taite, of course, had never heard the terms of the will as they affected Mrs. Mearely’s re-marriage. When she said she had heard rumours she meant that she was about to set some afloat. She put on her bonnet and took two pennies to the Widower’s Mite Society’s treasurer, Mr. Albert Andrews, and dropped the hint which, in due course, matured into the aim of his life. It was she who told the news to Wilton Howard, amid sly compliments; again sowing seed which, though ignored at the time, was to bear fruit later.

Mrs. Taite saw that the Judge was deliberately considering the pros and cons of a union with the young widow when all her black should have been put by, and she intended that he should not lack rivals. She knew that his legal mind would take its time in coming to a decision, and that his self-sufficient nature would neither anticipate rivals nor that the widow might say him nay. Meanwhile, there was the one chance in a hundred that Mrs. Mearely might marry a faster moving admirer.

She racked her brains for schemes to balk him. She even thought wildly of sending Mrs. Mearely anonymous letters, or of poisoning Villa Rose’s well by dropping a murdered cat into it. She nursed her fears in secret, copiously wept, prayed nightly that a worthy gentlewoman might not be brought to penury through the unnecessary matrimony of a paying guest, and took to walking at midnight, shut-eyed, in her nainsook and curl rags.

Meanwhile the judge had handed down his decision, and he apprehended no reversal of it by the higher court, i.e., by fair Rosamond herself. He felt that he, of all men, deserved her fortune because it was he who had prevented a pen-stroke from depriving her of it. Having accepted his decision, he began to formulate a plan of procedure. He rode out to Trenton churchyard and verified the date on the headstone. From that he computed a proper date for proposal, which appeared to be midsummer week, a year and six months from the day on which Mrs. Mearely had received him in black and white. He would go to see her—say, on a Wednesday—and inform her, in dignified yet adequate language, of the part he had played in smoothing life for her. She would have until Sunday to regard him as a benign fate and to become so mellowed with gratitude that, when he returned on the Sabbath afternoon to make formal offer of himself, she would answer with blushing enthusiasm, “Oh, be my fate again—a second time, and forever.”

Unaware that this midsummer day was Rosamond’s “Wonderful Day” (though, if he had known, he would have found the fact pleasantly apropos) or that she had given up her last attenuation of mourning only a few hours before he set out to make this preliminary and way-paving call—resolved upon, even to the date, eighteen months previously—Judge Giffen nosed his flea-bitten white horse up to the gate post, removed and replaced his tall hat in high and solemn salutation, slipped off his glove (gray, with two pearl buttons), enclosed Rosamond’s rosy palm, and said in the tone of one who conveys information of grave import:

“Good-afternoon, my dear Mrs. Mearely.”

Almost simultaneously he noticed the green-gray shot parasol and the lilac-bud silk gown and was distinctly pleased by the omen. It was, indeed, as if she had expected him.