ve her with us, no
doubt! I'd go on bread and water afterward to give her what she wants
now--wouldn't _you_? What are we old folks good for but to do our best
by our children?"

The Judge looked up at her, baffled, inarticulate. "Oh, of course," he
agreed helplessly, "we want to do the best by our children."

CHAPTER XV

A HALF-HOUR'S LIBERTY

Inside the big Interurban car Lydia and Rankin were talking with a
freedom that enormously surprised Lydia. The man had started up with an
exclamation of pleasure, had taken her bag, found a vacant seat, put her
next the window and sat down by her before Lydia, quite breathless with
the shock of seeing him, could do more than notice how vigorous he
looked, his tall, spare figure alert and erect, his ruddy hair and
close-clipped beard contrasting vividly with his dark-blue flannel shirt
and soft black hat. He was on a business trip, evidently, for on his
knees he held a tool-box with large ungloved hands, roughened and red.

With his usual sweeping disregard of conventional approaches, he plunged
boldly into the matter with which their thoughts were at once occupied.
"So this was why Dr. Melton insisted I should take this car. Well, I'm
grateful to him! It gives me a chance to relieve my mind of a weight of
remorse I've been carrying around."

Lydia looked at him, relieved and surprised at the hearty spontaneity of
this opening.

He misunderstood her expression. "You don't mind, do you, my speaking to
you about last fall--my saying I am so very sorry I made you all the
trouble Dr. Melton tells me I did? I'm really very sorry!"

Nothing could have more completely disarmed Lydia's acquired fear of him
as the bogey-man of her mother's exhortations. It is true that she was,
as she put it to herself, somewhat taken down by the contrast between
her secret thought of him as a wounded, rejected suitor, and this
clear-eyed, self-possessed, friendly reality before her; but, after a
momentary feeling of pique, coming from a sense of the romantic,
superficially grafted on her natural good feeling, she was filled with
an immense relief. Lydia was no man-eater. In spite of traditional
wisdom, she, like a considerable number of her contemporaries, was as
far removed from this stage of feminine development as from a Stone-age
appetite for raw meat. She now drew a long breath of the most honest
satisfaction that she had done him no harm, and smiled at Rankin. He
waited for her to