When he reached the garret—Adam and Olivia and little Phil had gone ahead—he stopped and looked about him.
“Well, upon my soul! You have turned things upside down,” he remarked in a graver tone. “And here’s where you two have spent all these days, is it?” Again his eye rested on Adam’s graceful figure, whose cheeks were flushed with his run upstairs. With the glance came a certain feeling of revolt, as if the lad’s very youth were an affront.
“Only in the morning, sir, while the light lasted,” explained Adam, noticing the implied criticism in the coldness of the Judge’s tones.
“Turn the picture, please, Mr. Gregg.”
For a brief moment the Judge, with folded arms, gazed into the canvas; then the straight lips closed, the brow tightened, and an angry glow mounted to the very roots of his gray hair.
“Mr. Gregg,” said the Judge in the same measured tone with which he would have sentenced a criminal, “if I did not know you to be a gentleman, and incapable of dishonor, I should ask you to leave my house. You may not have intended it, sir, but you have abused my hospitality and insulted my home. My wife is but a child, and easily influenced, and you should have protected her in my absence, as I would have protected yours. The whole thing is most disturbing, sir—and I——”
“Why—why—what is the matter?” gasped Adam. The suddenness of the attack had robbed him of his breath.
“Matter!” thundered the Judge. “Bad taste is the matter, if not worse! No woman should ever uncover her neck to any man but her husband! You have imposed upon her, sir, with your foreign notions. The picture shall never be hung!”
“But it is your own mother’s dress,” pleaded Olivia, a sudden flush of indignation rising in her face. “We found it in the trunk. It’s on my bed now—I’ll go and get it——”