"Everything," Mrs. Saxon said, goaded into an exaggeration foreign to her placid type, "everything, lately. You refusing to preside to-night. Lillian Burr shutting herself up in this uncanny way. It is uncanny, even if she is in trouble. Minna Randall taking to church work, and sewing for hours at a time, and taking long drives with her husband. They haven't been inside the Colonel's doors for weeks. Their second girl told our Mary that they have refused five invitations there in the last month. It's my idea that he gave that last stag dinner because he couldn't get Minna or Edith there, or any woman. Why should his own circle turn against him, just when he's doing real good to the town? And it's not only his own circle that's against him. I was matching curtains at Ward's when Sebastian came in to-day, and Luther Ward was barely civil to him—the Colonel's own secretary. What's wrong with the town, Hugh? Can't it be grateful to the Colonel, now when he really deserves it?"
"Don't worry about what Everard deserves. He's not likely to get it, Millie."
Again the Judge was closing the subject, and this time his wife had no more to say. She gave his threadbare, scrupulously pressed coat a final pat and jerk of adjustment, and stood off and looked at him.
"You'll do," she said, "now go along. The music's stopping. It won't look well if you're late."
She turned off the flickering gas jet above the marble-topped bureau abruptly, but not before the Judge had caught the gleam of tears in her eyes.
"Why girl," he said, and came close to her and slipped an arm round her plump, comfortable waist. "You're really troubled."
"Yes."
"And vexed with me for not helping you."
"Yes."
He had drawn her toward a front window of the big, square room. The Judge and his wife stood by it quietly, looking down through a triangle of white, starched curtains at the glimmering, sparsely lit length of street below, and straightening out their difficulties in darkness and silence, as all true lovers should, even lovers at fifty, as these two were fortunate enough to be.