"I don't approve," he said slowly, "but I admire."
"But why don't you approve?"
Shipman looked into the young eyes, wondering at their brown brook-like centers, slightly tremulous with tiny shifting lights of gold. As the girl laughed, they deepened into a curious maternal gleam, a hint of motherliness. Fascinated by the clear purity of her, realizing how little she could grasp of the hundred cheap misinterpretations of her acts, he kept silent.
"Wouldn't you have 'approved' if you had been in Colter's place?"
The lawyer straightened. After all, he was years older than she, even winged victories could come to grief; there were draggled wings and things that could not be victories. He saw the saucy inference and became somber, so somber that he had no answer to match his mood. Sard chose to be glibly interrogative.
"You must have seen that he is not a common man?" determinedly.
"You couldn't have known that when you picked him up," was the slightly testy reply. "People can't do these things; the world is slimy, putrid, about all such things. The only thing that keeps the Augean stables livable is people like you that don't know the slimy things exist. I'm not at all sure," said the lawyer, with a big brotherly air, "that you had any right to carry the thing so far without your father's knowledge. Suppose this man had been a stool-pigeon, one of the bands that tour the country with plans for house-breaking." As Shipman said the words he was tearing stray leaves in his hands, watching the drooping face, hating himself for casting a shadow on it.
"You have seen that he is a gentleman," returned Sard steadily. If she had been an older woman she would have played lightly with the thing, half caressing the man in his chivalrous disapproval of her. But the lovely thing about Sard was that she took no such ways. While youth is youth it plays the game squarely, directly, standing outside of its own little fortress of personality, demanding, "Who goes there—friend or foe?" and unhesitatingly letting down the portcullis for those who show the right colors even though they keep their visors down.
"I don't like to butt in," said Shipman, "but—but I'd rather have you think a little more, yet. I don't know; if you did think you wouldn't be you and you are——" The man muttered the end of the sentence; he suddenly recollected himself, rose restlessly and walked over toward the line of swamp maples walling the inner woods back of the stream. He peered a little anxiously into the rapidly glooming vistas. "I think, Miss Girl, that you had better go a little slow," was all he said.
Shipman, himself, had been making a surreptitious study of Colter, and had to admit that the man, though apparently aged through some kind of exposure and deathless sorrow, had every evidence of good breeding and clean life. There had been a curious muscular thinness to the long body that had spelled fundamental good health, though his cheeks were sunken and his hands nervous. Shipman had seen from the very beginning that Judge Bogart's man of all work at one time had physical training: riding, perhaps, cross-country walking; very much of a man, yet undoubtedly some ne'er do well who for reasons best known to himself had been willing to put himself under a girl's protection and affect so silly a disease as amnesia. Shipman balked at the amnesia theory. The lawyer half grimaced at the possibilities of Sard's awakening and disappointment. He cast about for some way in which he could warn the impulsive girl at his side yet help her in what she believed.