to Anne Oglesby, whose cold, quiet scorn had cut him even more deeply
than the bitterer words of the older woman.

"I'd do anything for Don--anything I thought he'd be willing to have me
do. But I don't see how such a thing as this could be kept down. How can
the law be set aside?"

"Listen here," he said, facing her, a little color of hope at last in
his face. "You don't in the least know what you've been starting here,
and you don't know anything about the remedy for it. The law? It's close
to politics, sometimes! If I fall--can't you see--I drag down plenty of
others--I drag down my own town--I drag down my whole judiciary--I've
been on the bench here myself. Oh, you two don't know all about how
things are done in politics. I'd drag down all the machinery of my own
party in this state--the thing would go even wider than that--I'd be
compromising the national administration itself. I tell you, it's ruin,
ruin, if this thing gets out. This is the very crisis of all my life--my
whole fate, my whole past and future, are in your hands now, and much
more beside--in the hands of you two women.

"But I've got to fight the best I may," he added, walking excitedly
apart, and smiting one hand into the other. "Look here, now," and he
turned to them with a new look on his haggard face. "Your fate's _in my
hands_, too! Go beyond reason with me--threaten and goad me too far--and
I'll see what can be done to ruin you two, if you succeed in ruining
me!"

"I've not asked that," said Aurora Lane. "I don't care about that.
What's revenge to me? And what's ruin? I've asked nothing of
you--nothing, but my boy's life, and never that till now. You gave it to
me once, unasked. I'm asking it again, now--his life--my boy's. I bore
him in grief and sorrow. It's your time of travail now. That's all."

Judge Henderson almost wept in his own self-pity.

"Think how horribly, how grotesquely unjust all this is," his voice
trembled--"raking up all the deeds of a man's youth. The past ought to
be _forgotten_. A man's past----"

"Or a woman's?" said Aurora.

"Well, yes, or a woman's. But it's men like me who have to build up
things, do things, administer things, wisely and justly. I've been a
judge on the bench here, before the world, I say. And here you two
women--why, it's ghastly, it's terrible, its _criminal_. Your dragging
me down--it--it's a hellish thing to do."

"What? What's that?" The voice of Aurora Lane rose again. "If there's
an