“Oh, dear, no; you mustn’t hurry things that way!” laughed the golden one. “You simply _can’t_ hurry them, you know, with a man like Judge Birrell. But I flatter myself that I made good in the try-out. Hartridge was there, with Miss Farron--though I can’t imagine how they got over from Highmount in the rain--so there was quite a house-party of us. At dinner-time it was raining harder than ever, and the judge wouldn’t hear to our going, though I had the top up on the car, and, of course, offered to take Hartridge and Miss Farron back to the college. So we all stayed to dinner. That dinner would have broken your heart, Vance.” “Why?” “Because it showed in a thousand little ways what the family has been, and what it has now come to. The china was Sèvres, but much of it was chipped and broken, and hardly any two pieces were alike. The table-cloth had once been somebody’s pride, but it had been laundered and darned until it was like a piece of old lace. The silver was evidently an heirloom, and it was so worn with much polishing that you could scarcely make out the engraving. We had chicken--I imagine nobody in the South ever gets so poor that he can’t have chicken--but the luxuries were conspicuous by their absence. Do you know what I think, Vance? I believe that the Westwood House cash assets are measured exactly by the size of Richardia’s Highmount salary.” “I shouldn’t wonder,” said Tregarvon, keenly sympathetic. “Richardia has given me to understand that there is a lot of mountain land, which is practically valueless now that the tan-bark timber has all been cut off; but there is nothing to bring an income.” “Wilmerding has told me something of the judge’s involvement with the original Ocoee promoters, and the struggle he made to keep his name good after he and his friends had been frozen out,” Carfax resumed. “He had recommended the scheme to a good many others, and when the smash came, he stripped himself bare to make good the losses of his friends, withholding nothing but a little money he had put aside for Richardia’s musical education.” Tregarvon nodded. “That explains something that Richardia said to me one time when we were talking about people marrying and settling down; she said, in that perfectly straightforward way of hers, that she would like to marry, but that she was in debt, and couldn’t marry until after she had earned enough money to pay herself out.” “She has said something of the same nature to me,” Carfax admitted. “But it seems that there were other troubles besides the property losses. The judge had a son, a year or so older than Richardia. He was a school-boy at the time of the big smash, but was old enough, Wilmerding says, to be hot-headed and a bit wild and ungovernable. Parker, the promoter, was foolish enough to show up here again, after the _débâcle_; and this boy actually tried to kill him; emptied a pistol at him, winged him with one of the shots, and then ran away. He has never been heard from since.”