She nodded slowly. “I--I am afraid I do. And I am going to plead for him, if you will let me. There are mitigating circumstances--prejudices against all Northerners _as_ Northerners. You can’t understand that, because the North didn’t suffer as the South did in the war between the States--at least, not in the same way. And the South has suffered bitterly since the war; from such men as Mr. Parker. There was a disposition on our part to let bygones be bygones, after the great struggle; but a few unprincipled promoters have done much to keep the old sectional animosities alive.” Tregarvon was regarding her thoughtfully. “You are wise beyond your years and your sex,” he said soberly. “What do you think I ought to do to this anachronistic gentleman who is visiting the sins of other people upon my poor head?” “I can only beg of you to be broad-minded and charitable and slow to anger for the sake of all concerned--for my sake, if you must put it upon narrower ground.” At this appeal, the earnestness of which could not be questioned, Tregarvon was frankly puzzled. A little earlier in the adventure he would not have been surprised to find Richardia Birrell pleading for Hartridge; but now, with Carfax apparently elbowing the professor aside in the sentimental field, there seemed to be less reason for the plea, unless pure friendship might account for it. “I shall put it wholly upon ‘narrower ground,’ as you call it,” he maintained. “If you tell me that you care enough for the man you are pleading for to ask me to spare him for your sake----” “Care enough?” she exclaimed, wide-eyed. “I should be singularly inhuman if I didn’t care!” As in a flash of revealing lightning Tregarvon saw and thought he understood. It was not Hartridge for whom she was interceding; the professor of mathematics was not the man who had driven with her to the glade on the night of strange happenings--who had stood with her in the shadow of the drill derrick, shaking his fist at the inanimate symbol of the renewed Ocoee activities. The moving spirit in all the enmities and antagonisms was her father! For a moment the thing seemed unbelievable. That a man who had formerly been a judge and a champion of the law should become a feudist, carrying his vindictiveness over from those who had defrauded him to the defrauders’ innocent successor, appeared blankly incredible. Yet Tregarvon remembered that the South still held many archaic well-springs of thought and action--he had to fight anachronisms daily in his laborers--and that the older generation was not to be judged by the standards of the new. Judge Birrell had felt the heel of the invader, not only in the great conflict between the States, but afterward, when the invader came as a friend and robbed him in the name of business.