n Morrow.

"I think you are right," he said. "I think this is a triangular affair
with the state a party. I am in the service of the state. Will you
kindly put the table by this window."

They thought he wished the air, and would thus escape the closeness of
the room. And while my father stood aside, Zindorf and his guest carried
the flat writing table to the window and placed a chair.

My father sat down behind the table by the great open window, and looked
at Zindorf.

The man moved and acted like a monk. He had the figure and the tonsured
head. His coarse, patched clothes cut like the homely garments of the
simple people of the day, were not wholly out of keeping to the part.
The idea was visualized about him; the simplicity and the poverty of the
great monastic orders in their vast, noble humility. All striking and
real until one saw his face!

My father used to say that the great orders of God were correct in this
humility; for in its vast, comprehensive action, the justice of God
moved in a great plain, where every indicatory event was precisely
equal; a straw was a weaver's beam.

God hailed men to ruin in his court, not with spectacular devices, but
by means of some homely, common thing, as though to abase and overcome
our pride.

My father moved the sheets of foolscap, and tested the point of the
quill pen like one who considers with deliberation. He dipped the point
into the inkpot and slowly wrote a dozen formal words.

Then he stopped and put down the pen.

"The contests of the courts," he said, "are usually on the question of
identity. I ought to see this slave for a correct description."

The two men seemed for a moment uncertain what to do.

Then Zindorf addressed my father.

"Pendleton," he said, "the fortunes of life change, and the ideas suited
to one status are ridiculous in another. Ordez was a fool. He made
believe to this girl a future that he never intended, and she is under
the glamor of these fancies."

He stood in the posture of a monk, and he spoke each word with a clear
enunciation.

"It is a very delicate affair, to bring this girl out of the
extravagances with which Ordez filled her idle head, and not be brutal
in it. We must conduct the thing with tact, and we will ask you,
Pendleton, to observe the courtesies of our pretension."

When he had finished, he flung a door open and went down a stairway. For
a time my father heard his footsteps, echoing, like those of a priest