That broke the spell, for the moment. Laurence smiled bitterly.
"You know what my people were—and what your people thought of them," he said in a cutting tone. "To tell the truth, that's one reason I want to go. I want to forget that I lived in Shanty-town and my mother was Mrs. Carlin the washerwoman, not good enough to associate with your women—that weren't good enough, most of them, to tie the shoes on her little feet!"
The Judge turned, pulling the broad brim of his hat over his eyes, and looked at the young man's face, pale and set with ugly lines.
"Laurence," he said after a moment, "if you're the man I think you are, you won't want to forget that. We can none of us forget what we have been, what we came from. You can't do anything for your mother now, and I know it's bitter to you. But you can make her name, her son, respected and honoured here—not somewhere else, where she was never known, but here, where she lived. That would mean a lot to her. Doesn't it mean something to you?"
The Judge continued to look earnestly at Laurence's face, and presently saw it relax, soften, saw the stormy dark-blue eyes clear, become fixed as though upon a light ahead.
"Judge," said Laurence huskily, "you understand a lot of things. Perhaps you're right—"
The Judge, holding whip and reins in one hand, put out the other and they shook hands warmly. They were silent for a while, then the Judge began to talk about the local situation, finance and politics, with a good many shrewd personal sketches mixed in.
"You want to know every string to this town," he remarked.
Judge Baxter knew all these strings, evidently, and could, he insinuated, pull a good many of them. Though too modest to point the fact, he himself illustrated his contention that, to live in a small town, a man need not be small. If he knew Cook county thoroughly, the county knew him too. He had rather the air of a magnate, in spite of his seedy dress, his beard stained with tobacco. He had more money than he cared for. His only adornment was a big diamond in an old-fashioned ring on his little finger, but he drove as good horses as money could buy.
Near the end of their journey he asked: