Courtesy commanded Rosamond to open the gate and invite the Judge in. She disobeyed. She leaned over the bar, so that he himself could not effect entrance, and said sweetly:

“How fortunate that you arrived at this moment and not later. For I can at least exchange a word of greeting with you ere I continue on my way.”

He pondered this unforeseen contingency. That she might not be at home to receive him on the day set had never occurred to him.

“You are going out?”

“I am obliged to go. It is an unescapable duty that I must perform.”

“Surely you are not going any distance on foot?”

“Oh—er—the carriage will be here in a moment,” she said hastily. “Er—in fact—I think I hear it—I mean, see it—down the hill. Isn’t that Blake now, driving in from the Poplars road?” She shaded her eyes and peered, as if she were honestly trying to distinguish the driver of a romping steed, which was just then taking the lowest turn of the hill at a gallop. By strategy and force, Blake had succeeded in driving the mare round the tower and back to the Roseborough road.

“Ah, yes, Blake. You know I advised poor dear Mearely to sell Florence; but he said she was such a beautiful creature that he would rather risk his neck with her than sit safely behind an ugly beast. I should advise you to use Marquis, my dear lady. That mare is not reliable.”

“So Blake says. He threatened to take her to the farm yesterday. But he also says he can manage her; and, as he always does manage her I take his word for my safety and don’t worry.”

The Judge had a happy thought.

“You may regard your own safety thus lightly, fair lady. But will you not consider the place you hold in our hearts? Can any gallant man in Roseborough think of your unprotected loveliness in danger and keep his pulses steady?”

Inwardly Rosamond registered another plaintive and helpless protest against the misuse of her bright gown which circumstance was making that day. “They’ll drive me back to crape,” she said to herself, “in order to have my adventures free from persecution.” Aloud she said, veiling her eyes till they were only a peep of sparkling blue heavens through clouds:

“I have begun to feel lately that Roseborough’s gentlemen have indeed—so to speak—a perception of my lonely state.”

“Ah. As to the others I can’t say. They would hardly have the—ah—same interest as myself. No, hardly, I have a personal responsibility regarding you.”

She interrupted quickly.

“Has your invitation reached you yet, for to-night?”

“Ah—yes. I thank you. I met Mrs. Witherby on the bridge. Ah—I was about to say....”

“Can that possibly be Florence pounding up the hill? Yes, it is. Dear me. Really, I wish she were more sedate, to-day of all days.”

Rosamond was talking against time; her words meant nothing more than that she desired to keep the Judge at bay until the carriage arrived, when she would pretend she had visits to make and so dismiss him. Not understanding this, the Judge was inspired by her last sentence to a very pretty belief; namely, that Mrs. Mearely wished her mare to trot sedately on this day, because she was on her way to the cemetery; a visit to the Mearely plot being her delicate method of assuring both the departed and Roseborough that her return to colours betokened no frivolity of spirit—that she was still a Mearely and would maintain the Mearely dignity. This also, he thought, was a good omen for him; since there could be no question about his superfitness to assist her in her loyal task.

“My dear lady....” He spoke with a slow profundity which made the blinking, sparkling eyes open wide at him. “You are on the way to his—ah—grave. I understand. I may say I more than understand. I will postpone until this evening—ah—the communication I came here to make to you. Um—ah—drop a posy—ah—on the poor fellow for me, will you not?”

Rosamond stared at him as blankly as any milkmaid.

“What?” said she, with unmodified bluntness.

Whatever might have developed, in the course of explanation, was prevented by a rival emissary of fate, with less propriety and more force than Judge Giffen. Florence rounded the curve. She had the bit in her teeth and blood in her eye—and the devil himself in her heels and her head. Blake was chiefly occupied in administering punishment. If she would bolt, she should do it under the whip, until discouragement set in.

Florence, being dumb, could not explain what it was about the stolid, large, high-backed, flea-bitten white horse (and possibly his imposing master) which irritated her beyond endurance; but she expressed herself after her temperament. She swerved from the road and, charging upon the unsuspecting nag—whose back was toward her, his head sunk in the timothy along the wall—bit him sharply on the rump. The flea-bitten white was less stolid than he looked. He emitted a shrill snort and kicked with all his might; the Judge lost his hat and almost lost his seat. Florence pranced in and nipped the other side. Whereupon the flea-bitten white sounded his protest to all the world, reared, turned and ran at a racing gait down the hill. The Judge’s pince-nez flew off in one direction and his crop in the other; the bridle had already been jerked from his easy hold, so that it is no slur on his horsemanship to say that Judge Giffen rode down the first two winds of the hill clinging to the pommel.

What of Florence? In sidling in to take her second nip, she had swung the light vehicle half-round, and now, ere Blake could get the mastery, she swung it all the way and charged off down the hill again. The pounding of hoofs on the gravel brought more than one Roseborough dweller to her front windows. Presumably Mrs. Mearely’s were not the only eyes to see the finale. The judge’s horse, ignoring the shouts of the toll-man and the closing of the bridge to let a tow go by, leaped the gates and the towline and galloped over the bridge and disappeared in a cloud of dust.

Blake’s experience was less happy. Florence did not include the carriage in her calculations, but attempted to perform the same feat. She got through the barrier, by taking it with her; but the wheels were tipped by the fence rails, the vehicle rose upon its side and Blake dived, as if from a springboard, into the river. His aquatics seemed to satisfy Florence’s passion for excitement for that day at least. She righted herself deftly and began to crop the clover beside the path, all mildness now as to mien.

The men on the barge fished Blake out with ropes and a hook. He was none the worse evidently, for he climbed to his seat and started Florence homeward under a harsh hand.

Until then Mrs. Mearely had had the grace to resist the temptation to laugh. Now the storm took her, and shook her the worse for her repression. She laughed until she was so limp that she was obliged to hang on to the gate to keep from falling, and then she laughed until she was so limp that she could no longer hold to the gate. She collapsed in a bed of mignonette and sweet alyssum, green parasol and all, exactly as if some one had broken off a big bunch of lilac and tossed it there. In the end, she turned over on her side, laid her head on a white close-growing pillow of alyssum and wept quietly, because flesh and blood could bear no more.

Thus Blake found her, when dripping coachman and foaming mare stopped at the gate. “By the Lud! Mrs. Mearely, mum, are ye in a swound? The dundered ’oss ’ll kill us all afore she’s contented.”

“No, Blake. I—I’m all right now,” Rosamond answered weakly. “What—what do you suppose is the matter with the mare?”

“The mare,” he exploded wrathfully. “Well, mare she may be, an’ mare she is; but a lady she ain’t, nor never will be! She’s a wicious, a indecent, an’ a cavortin’ female—an’ ’eadstrong, also, like all of her sect. I never saw a female of any specie that was wuth her salt; an’ they’re that irksome they wears a man out with chastisin’ of ’em. Soon as I’ve got a dry change on me, I’m a-goin’ to take this she-himp of Satan out to the farm; and I’ll give her such a what-for on the road as’ll tone down her ’abits, or I’m but a ol’ feeble liar.”

“You’ll bring Marquis back?”

“Ay, mum. Marquis is a gentleman. But I won’t be bringin’ ’im till to-morrow afternoon, or mebbe next day. It’s accordin’. Look at her—the deceiver! To see her now, you’d say she wouldn’t steal oats. Ugh! You ’ap’azard critter! Did you see what she done, mum? Did you see what she done to his honour, the Jodge—to his honour, Jodge Giffen? ‘As she got any rev’rence to her? Not a penn’orth! She prances on to the werry dignity of the Court, an’ rares up an’ bites his Sycle-hops. Ugh! You ’eretic! Bitin’ the werry dignity of the Court in his Sycle-hops!”

“Bites? Blake, what on earth do you mean?” She asked the question in trepidation, lest the strange word prove a disguise for some indelicacy, Blake being simple and rustic of speech.

“His Sycle-hops. His ’oss, mum. His brown ’oss is named ‘Seep-yer’—for the colour, he says; w’ich is some sort of a ’igh-tone joke befittin’ a Jodge, no doubt. An’ the flea-bitten w’ite he calls Sycle-hops, says he, account of him bein’ sech a ’uge ’oss an’ one eye a bit better’n t’other.” Mrs. Mearley’s recently acquired knowledge of mythology came to her aid.

“Oh! Cyclops!” She was relieved.

“Jes’ wot I said. An’ that’s wot this wicious an’ wulgar female of her sect’s gone an’ bit! I’m mortyfied, mum, plumb mortyfied. I’ll drive round now an’ get a dry change, afore the five teeth I’ve got drops out from chill; an’ then I’ll be off till to-morrow—or next day. It’s accordin’. Ugh! You shameless, wile, an’ himproper hanimal, you! I’ll learn ye to respect the Courts o’ the land.”

“So you won’t be here to-night. Very well. Hurry off at once, before you get more rheumatism. But I hope you won’t whip Florence any more. I’m particularly fond of her. You must not be cruel to her, Blake.” “She’s a female; an’ wot else can ye do with a female? They’re cavorters, from the first one down the line. If I’d a-ben Adam, I’d a-seen wot the A’mighty meant when he called it the tree o’ knowledge—a tree full o’ switches, that’s wot! An’ I’d a-stopped the cavortin’ of the sect right there where it started. Yes, mum; H’eve would a-ben a different ’ooman if Timothy Blake had ’ad her. It would a-ben the makin’ of her,” he added regretfully. “Good-day, mum.”

He did not turn his head as he drove off and, therefore, was not affronted by the sight of his mistress rocking with laughter.

“I wonder if the Judge’s horse has stopped running yet?” she said to herself, and danced up and down on her toes with delight. “I shall always love Florence for that. I think she postponed a declaration.”

Three o’clock did not sound from the stone tower. The toll-man became so interested in relating to a farmer, who was taking a load of live fowls to Trenton, the exciting story of Florence’s achievements—with historical references to the Giffen and Mearely families, and notes on Blake’s pedigree, also Florence’s, besides digressions as to his own age, health, and episodic life-story—that three passed to four without interrupting his train of thought. When the farmer and his squawking equipage passed on, the toll-man went into the tower to fill his pipe from the cut plug in his coat pocket, planning to take a few pleasant puffs before repeating the story all over again to a black-suited, black-whiskered stranger he saw reaching the bridge on the Trenton side. His coat hung under the clock; and, since the clock ticked at ten after four, he rang the hour. When he stepped out again, the stranger had disappeared. He did not observe an abnormal trembling of the tall rushes and sedges by the Roseborough slough, as if a large body were crawling among them.