So the Judge nodded to her and said, "Miss Masters, I'm going to have 'Apache Bill' report to you. You two might talk over a boy-scout organization down there in his district."
As the girl rose from her chair, the Judge's face suddenly developed stern lines and his brows knit closely as he turned his attention to the principal complainant.
"John Vaster," he announced, this time with no softening of tone, "a probation officer is coming to your house, too. If those boys of yours go to Mike's place after this with a bucket, or if you don't find a way to keep them off the streets at night, you're coming back here, not as a prosecuting witness but as a defendant."
Anne Masters had turned to this work of volunteer probation officer as to a refuge from herself. Perhaps in her own mind it stood also for a sort of penance for sins with which she stood self-charged.
Her marriage with Morgan had been set for June, and somehow it seemed to her that when the ceremony had been gone through with her besetting doubts and struggles would end, if not in happiness, at least in resignation. Then she would acknowledge the abdication of Romance and accept her allegiance to Duty.
But meanwhile, until the solemn seal of the Church's ritual had been set upon that resolve, bringing, as she sought to convince herself it would, a steadied feeling of solace and of perplexities resolved, she seemed to hang like a Mahomet's coffin in suspended disquiet and misery.
Boone had said he would never explain—and she accepted his assertion as final. But for that explanation which she had once silenced, and which, when she was receptive, he had refused, she now burned with anxiety. Unless she had work to do while she fought back the insurgency and revolt of her heart, she would not be able to endure the pictures with which her imagination filled the future. Through this period of heartache she missed the essential, in that she did not discern the artificiality of the whole situation or the cure that would have lain in a repudiation of false pride.
Whatever mistakes she had made, she was now bound by her promise to Morgan, and doubly bound by the tyranny of her mother's dependence which, having been once accepted, could no longer be repudiated.
Colonel Wallifarro, bending over his desk one forenoon some two months after he had given the dinner to announce his son's engagement, had chokingly fallen forward with his face on his elbows.
When the physicians arrived, he was lying on his office lounge under the age-yellowed engraving of President Jefferson Davis and the grouped cabinet of the erstwhile Confederate States of America, and it was there that he died within the half hour.