The judge refused to take a nap, though when he sat down on the veranda he did take one, lying back in his chair with one of the many sections of the Sunday paper spread over his face. It was from this somewhat undignified posture that he was aroused by a step; he started up hastily.

“I beg your pardon,” said the young man, who stood on the steps twirling his straw hat round and round in his hands. The young man went on with an anxious smile:

“This is Judge Blair, I presume? My name is Marley—Glenn Marley.”

If Marley had known that there were men then in the Ohio penitentiary serving terms that were longer by years than they would have been had Judge Blair digested his breakfast, or been allowed to finish his afternoon nap, he would have chosen another hour to press his suit. But he had youth’s sublime confidence, and its abiding faith in the abstract quality of justice. He had dreaded this moment, but it had forced itself upon his keen conscience as a duty, and when he heard that morning that Judge Blair had returned he resolved to have it out at once.

“May I have a word with you?” he asked, advancing a little.

The judge nodded, but slightly, as if it were necessary for him, as a fattening man advanced in middle life, to conserve his energies. His nod seemed to include not only an assent, however reluctant, but a permission as well, to take the other chair that stood, all ready to rock comfortably, on the veranda. Marley took the chair but he did not rock, nor did he yield himself to it, but sat somewhat tensely on its very edge.

“It’s warm this afternoon, isn’t it?” he said, trying to keep up his smile. He felt hopeless about it, but the thought, darting through his mind, that Lavinia was near, braced his purpose. The judge sat hunched in his chair, with his short white hair tumbled rather picturesquely, and his chin low in his collar. His lips were set firmly, his brows contracted. He breathed heavily, and on his strong aquiline nose, Marley could see tiny drops of perspiration.

“I have come,” said Marley, “to speak to you, Judge Blair, on a matter of, that is, importance. That is, I have come to ask you if I might—ah—pay my addresses to your daughter.”

Marley thought this form of putting it rather fine, and he was glad that that much of it, at least, was over. And yet, much as he liked this old-fashioned formula about paying his addresses, he instantly felt its inadequacy, and so nerved himself to do it all over.

“I mean Lavinia,” he said hurriedly, as if to correct any error of identification he might have led the judge into. “I want to marry her.”

The judge, still breathing heavily, looked at Marley out of his narrowed eyes.

“You know,” Marley said, in an explanatory way, “I love her.”

He waited then, but the judge was motionless, even to the hand that hung at his side over the arm of his chair, still holding his paper. Now and then, at what seemed to be long, unequal intervals, his eyelids fell slowly in heavy winks.

“How long have you and Lavinia known each other?” he asked finally.

“I met her several weeks ago, out at Captain Carter’s. But I did not see her again, that is to speak to her, until about a week ago. In one way I have known her, you might say, but a week; yet I feel that I have known her a long time, always, in fact. I—I—well, I loved her at first sight.” Marley dropped his face at this speech, for it seemed that he had made it too sentimental; he had a feeling that the judge so regarded it. He sat and picked at the braids of straw in his hat.

“And have you spoken to her?” asked the judge.

“Oh yes!” said Marley, looking up quickly.

“And she—?”

“She loves me.”

The judge closed his eyes as if in pain. Then he stirred, the paper dropped from his fingers, and he drew himself up in his chair, as if to deal with the matter.

“How old are you, Mr. Marley?” he inquired.

“I am twenty-two,” said Marley, confidently, as if this maturity must incline the judge in his favor. “I cast my first vote for McKinley.” He thought this, too, would help matters, and possibly it did.

“You have completed your education?”

“I graduated this summer from the Ohio Wesleyan.”

“And what are you doing now, or proposing to do?”

“Just now, I am studying law,” he announced. “I’m going to make the law my profession.”

Marley looked up with a high faith in this final appeal, but even that did not impress the judge as Marley felt a tribute thus delicately implied should affect him.

“You are reading with a preceptor, I take it?”

“Yes, sir, in Mr. Powell’s office.”

Judge Blair looked at Marley as if he were deciding what to do with him. After he had looked a while he gazed off across the street, drumming with his finger-tips on the arm of his chair. Presently, without turning, and still gazing abstractedly into the distance—and in that instant Marley remembered that he had seen the judge stare at the ceiling of the court room in exactly the same way while sentencing a culprit—he began to speak.

“Lavinia is yet very young, Mr. Marley,” he said, “with no knowledge of the world, and, perhaps, little of the state of her own mind. You too, are young, very young, and as yet without an occupation. You are, it is true, studying law, but it will be three years before you can be admitted, and many years after that before you can command a practice that would warrant you in marrying. In this day, the outlook for the young lawyer is not encouraging. I do not think I would wish a son of mine to choose that profession; the great changes that have transpired, and are transpiring in our industrial development, have greatly reduced the chances of the young lawyer’s success. The practice in the smaller county-seats, like our own, for instance, has almost entirely vanished. The settlement of titles to real estate, so lucrative a branch of the law in the early days of my own practice, has deprived the later practitioners of that source of revenue; the field of criminal law has become narrowed, unremunerative and almost disreputable. The corporation work can be handled by one or two firms in each town, and all that seems to be left is the prosecution of personal injury suits, and that is a work that hardly appeals to the man of dignity and self-respect. The large cities have a wider, I might say, the only field, but there the young lawyer must spend years of the hardest, most unremitting toil before he can come to anything like success.”

The judge paused. He had not intended to speak at such length, but the habit of the courts was on him, and once started, he found his own didacticism so pleasing to himself, that it was with reluctance that he paused at all. He might not have stopped when he did, but gone on almost indefinitely, as he did when he delivered what were always spoken of as his beautiful charges to juries, had he not recalled, with something like a pang of resentment, that the happiness of his own, instead of another’s child, lay at the bottom of all this. He turned then to face Marley. The young man was sitting there, his eyes wide, and his face long. The color that flamed in it when he first appeared, was now quite gone. It was gray and cold instead.

“You will see, Mr. Marley,” the judge resumed, “that you are hardly in a position to ask for my daughter’s hand. Of course,” the judge allowed a smile to soften somewhat the fixity of his lips, “I appreciate your manliness in coming to me, and I do not want to be understood as making any reflections upon, or in the least questioning, your character, your worth, or the honor of your intentions. But in view of your youth and of Lavinia’s, and in view of your own, as yet, unsettled position in life, you must see how impossible it is that anything like an engagement should subsist between you. I say this because I wish only for Lavinia’s happiness. I may say that I am not unmindful of your happiness, too, and I esteem it my duty to reach the conclusions I have just presented to you.”

“And I—I can not even see her?” stammered Marley, in his despair.

“I have not said that,” the judge said. “I shall always be pleased to extend to you the hospitality of my house, of course; but I would not consider it necessary for you to see her regularly, or intimately, and I certainly would not want you to monopolize her society to the exclusion of other young men with whom she has been in the habit of associating.”

Marley sat there, after this long harangue, with his head downcast. He sat and turned his hat round and round. At last he did look up with an appeal in his eyes, but when he saw that the judge was sitting there, as he had at first, sunk in his chair, breathing heavily and looking at him out of those sluggish eyes, he arose. He stood a moment, and looked off across the street somewhere, anywhere. Then he smote one hand lightly into the other, turned, and said:

“Well—good afternoon, Judge Blair.”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Marley,” the judge replied. He watched Marley go down the walk and out of the gate.