"Did he say he would?"
"Yes, yes, of course! But when I told him that, I didn't know you; and I did not think Don ever would know who his father was. He doesn't know even now."
Judge Henderson turned suddenly, catching at a thought which came to him from Aurora's words.
"Why should anyone ever know!" he began. "If this whole matter could be quieted down—if this case could be dismissed——
"Would you promise me," he turned toward Aurora—"if I could manage in some way to get all this hushed down—if I could save the boy's life—would you promise me, both of you, never to tell a soul in the world—never to let anyone get a breath of this? You are the only two that really know it at all—you said, Aurora, that even the boy doesn't know it all. Why should he, ever? It's been hid this long, why not longer?"
"Anne and I, and yourself, are the only human beings in the world who know it all," said Aurora Lane.
"Can you keep such a secret?" Judge Henderson turned more doubtfully to Anne Oglesby, whose cold, quiet scorn had cut him even more deeply than the bitterer words of the older woman.
"I'd do anything for Don—anything I thought he'd be willing to have me do. But I don't see how such a thing as this could be kept down. How can the law be set aside?"
"Listen here," he said, facing her, a little color of hope at last in his face. "You don't in the least know what you've been starting here, and you don't know anything about the remedy for it. The law? It's close to politics, sometimes! If I fall—can't you see—I drag down plenty of others—I drag down my own town—I drag down my whole judiciary—I've been on the bench here myself. Oh, you two don't know all about how things are done in politics. I'd drag down all the machinery of my own party in this state—the thing would go even wider than that—I'd be compromising the national administration itself. I tell you, it's ruin, ruin, if this thing gets out. This is the very crisis of all my life—my whole fate, my whole past and future, are in your hands now, and much more beside—in the hands of you two women.
"But I've got to fight the best I may," he added, walking excitedly apart, and smiting one hand into the other. "Look here, now," and he turned to them with a new look on his haggard face. "Your fate's in my hands, too! Go beyond reason with me—threaten and goad me too far—and I'll see what can be done to ruin you two, if you succeed in ruining me!"