last day Neil was drunk when he rode with the Missinaba Horse to the
station to join the Third Contingent for the war, and all the street of
the little town was one great roar of people--

But the judge never knew, and now he never will. For if you could find
it in the meanness of your soul to tell him, it would serve no purpose
now except to break his heart, and there would rise up to rebuke you the
pictured vision of an untended grave somewhere in the great silences of
South Africa.

Did I say above, or seem to imply, that the judge sometimes spoke
harshly to his wife? Or did you gather for a minute that her lot was
one to lament over or feel sorry for? If so, it just shows that you know
nothing about such things, and that marriage, at least as it exists
in Mariposa, is a sealed book to you. You are as ignorant as Miss
Spiffkins, the biology teacher at the high school, who always says
how sorry she is for Mrs. Pepperleigh. You get that impression simply
because the judge howled like an Algonquin Indian when he saw the
sprinkler running on the lawn. But are you sure you know the other side
of it? Are you quite sure when you talk like Miss Spiffkins does about
the rights of it, that you are taking all things into account? You might
have thought differently perhaps of the Pepperleighs, anyway, if you had
been there that evening when the judge came home to his wife with one
hand pressed to his temple and in the other the cablegram that said
that Neil had been killed in action in South Africa. That night they
sat together with her hand in his, just as they had sat together thirty
years ago when he was a law student in the city.

Go and tell Miss Spiffkins that! Hydrangeas,--canaries,--
temper,--blazes! What does Miss Spiffkins know about it all?

But in any case, if you tried to tell Judge Pepperleigh about Neil now
he wouldn't believe it. He'd laugh it to scorn. That is Neil's
picture, in uniform, hanging in the dining-room beside the Fathers of
Confederation. That military-looking man in the picture beside him is
General Kitchener, whom you may perhaps have heard of, for he was very
highly spoken of in Neil's letters. All round the room, in fact, and
still more in the judge's library upstairs, you will see pictures of
South Africa and the departure of the Canadians (there are none of the
return), and of Mounted Infantry and of Unmounted Cavalry and a lot of
things that only soldiers and the fathers of soldiers know