"Sure?" demanded Miss Aurelia, ruffling, "sure? That's what you wanted to know all along! Well then, why didn't you forbid it, if you were afraid? You know how Sard does things. How could I help it? Have you ever told Sard not to be seen with this man? I have worried about it all day. Not that I fear for Sard," poor Miss Aurelia saw too late the curious gleam in the Judge's eyes, "only she doesn't realize that people will talk. The men in the Morris bank—and all—why, only yesterday——" but the reminiscence trailed off like a whiff of smoke in the blue haze of Miss Aurelia's mind. "Why should you ask me such a thing?" she said. Her inflection was enough to damn the entire expedition.
Judge Bogart sat back in his chair. He raised his eyes to the ceiling with the air of registering an important bit of evidence. "Umph," he said slowly, "just what I thought." He pulled down his lower lip, and looked at his sister. "Precisely what I thought. It seems that I," repeated the Judge, staring, "must take my own daughter in hand."
"Now, now," said Miss Aurelia, with a frightened attempt to palliate; "nobody needs to take Sard in hand. Why, she, they——" But her brother waved her to some strange dungeon existing in his own mind.
"You are acting in the capacity of Sard's mother," he said grandiloquently; "you have failed. It was for you to have watched over her and to have kept her from entangling matters, the sort of thing a hot-headed girl gets into. You ought to know——" The Judge grimly paused.
But Miss Reely felt that it was not entirely discreet to understand this inference that she "ought to know."
"How should I know?" She tossed her head. "I never thought about such things, but," suddenly her old manner returned, "you are mistaken about Sard. It is only the under-dog she is interested in. Look at her about Terence O'Brien, and she has never even seen him. She's been interested in under-dogs ever since she came home from college. I never realized it," confessed Miss Aurelia with a nervous cough, "until Dunstan gave her that box at Christmas labeled 'Under-dog Biscuits,' and it had twenty-five dollars in it for Sard to give to tramps." Miss Aurelia, in spite of her perturbation, could not help the slight tremor of a smile, but she sought to propitiate her brother. "Of course," she confessed, "Sard isn't exactly my idea of a lady, not a bit like her mother. But she may grow more like her."
The man and woman in the Bogart dining-room instinctively conjured up this possible resemblance to Sard's mother, to the little curls and rows of buttons, the little rings and chains and bracelets, the tiny web of handkerchief and the sweet smell of scented lace over a tightly corseted little bosom. Poor Miss Aurelia, standing timidly back of her brother's chair, tried faithfully to see her niece formed on this pattern and utterly failed.
"The girls seem different nowadays. I don't know what it is," she complained, "they take long steps. They are—um—healthier. Don't you know how they shake hands with you as if they said, 'Well, what are you good for?'" Miss Aurelia pondered. "I was so different in my own youth," she sighed; "you remember, brother, I spent much of my time in bed taking medicine."
"Well, it kept you a lady, and a fool," snapped Judge Bogart. Now he rose from his luncheon chair with the effect of charging the jury.