He stood in his door watching the old colonel’s erect figure walking up the long road under the shadow of the great trees that lined it at intervals. There was something at once stately and appealing in the old man’s aspect, yet there was power in his eyes and the pose of his white head. He reminded Caleb of an old lion, sorely stricken but magnificent; some wound had gone deep. As yet the younger man had no notion of it; when he did know he marveled much at the strange mingling of knight-errantry and tenderness in the breast of one of Nature’s noblemen. As it was, he was supremely conscious that he liked Colonel Royall and that Colonel Royall liked him, but that the colonel was vividly aware that the shopkeeper at the Cross-Roads was not his social equal; Caleb wondered bitterly if he went further, and considered that the gentleman of good blood and breeding was his equal when in law and politics? He turned from the door with a whimsical smile and patted his dog’s uplifted head; then, as his eyes lighted on the worn leather chair in which the colonel had just sat, he turned it abruptly to the wall. VIII BEFORE Sunday Caleb’s settlement of his first case was celebrated in Eshcol. Judge Hollis got the facts from Juniper and spread the story abroad. It was too good to keep. The cockerel was valued at three dollars, being rare, and the pullets cost seventy-five cents each. The attorney for the defendant had paid the costs without pleading the case at the bar. The judge asked if he intended to settle all difficulties on the same plane? If so, he could send him enough clients to form a line down the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans. Juniper was telling it too, without grasping the judge’s point of view. As a lawyer, Juniper claimed that Caleb Trench could out-Herod Herod. He protested that the mere paying for the fowls had saved Lysander from being tarred and feathered; for Aaron Todd’s indignant threats were magnified by memory, and no one but Mr. Trench would have thought of so simple and efficacious a remedy. The settlement of Lysander’s difficulties coming after the famed Cresset speech created a sensation between wrath and merriment among Caleb’s political opponents. What manner of man was he? Caleb Trench, Quaker, posted on his door might have explained him to some, but to the majority it would have remained Greek. Besides, Caleb was not orthodox; he had always leaned to his mother’s religion, and she had been an Episcopalian; between the two creeds he had found no middle course, but he had a profound respect for the faith that brought Diana to her knees with the simplicity of a child in the little old gray stone church where the new curate had installed a boy choir.