“Banks is failin’ and thieves is stealin’,” was their lament. “There ain’t nobody ever done so well by us as you, Judge. It won’t bother you none to take care of just this little. We won’t say nothin’ about your havin’ it.”
At times like these the Judge turned a wistful gaze on the lawyer, and with something of appeal in his eyes. But he met; always the shake of the head and the tightening of the lips.
“You can’t afford to take a single chance, Judge,” the Squire had told him at the beginning of the business. “You must not owe one man a dollar. Your books and your papers will be your own, then. And they must be burned. Evidence of this sort must not haunt your last days or your family after you are gone. Forgive me for having made the conditions that I have, but it is the only way out for all of us.”
Those in town who were at first surprised that Squire Look had been accepted as the Judge’s man of business found ready explanation in the public quarrel of the Look brothers, and the fact that the Squire was better qualified than any one else in Palermo to manage the affairs of an old man whose grip on them had slipped.
Outsiders saw only the relations of client and lawyer.
Even such an insider as the Squire himself had been seeing not much else during the weeks that had elapsed since the town meeting.
For on the first day of the many on which he came to Judge Willard’s office he had met Sylvena, and she had such a new, strange, even disquieting light in her eyes that he had blurted something that gave her final and complete proof that he understood his musty law books better than he did a woman’s heart.
“Sylvie,” he said, “I have been ashamed of myself ever since. I had no right to take advantage just because you asked a favour of me that a friend ought to be ready and willing to grant. I’m an old brute, and I know it. You asked me to help your father, and I reached out across your heart and your needs and grabbed as a robber grabs at a pocketbook. I’m ashamed of it. I ought to know that that isn’t the way to win a woman, but I reckon I don’t know much of anything outside of my law. No, don’t try to forgive me! I’ve got the old grip on myself again. You needn’t worry!”
And she, with her heart stirring ever since that day when for the first time a true man’s earnest, eager, imperious love had claimed her—she who had come to him again yearning for a confirmation even, sweeter, bit her lips when he whirled and left her, gazed after him with eyes that filled, and then—well, then she stamped her foot and muttered something that it would have astonished the Squire to hear.
He did not see her on every visit. But sometimes she was on the porch, and when the weather grew warmer she was often busy with her shrubs on the lawn.