Thereupon, Adelle went on her way more swiftly, with a conscious purpose guiding her feet, and found Mountcourt Street--a little, quiet, by-path of a street such as exists in no other city of our famous land. It was not a rifle-shot from the court-house and the busiest centers of the city, yet it was as retired and as reposeful as if it had been forgotten ever since the previous century, when its houses were built. And in the middle of the first block, a sober, little brick house with an old white painted door and window lights, was Judge Orcutt's number. Adelle was shown to a small room in the front of the house and sat down, her heart strangely beating as if she were waiting an appointment with a lover. The house was so still! An old French clock ticked silently on the mantelpiece beneath a glass case. All the chairs and tables, even the rug, in the small room seemed like the house and the street, relics of an orderly, peaceful past. Adelle knew something about furniture and house decoration: it was one of the minor arts patronized by her class, and she had learned enough to talk knowingly about "periods" and "styles." Judge Orcutt's house was of no particular "period" or "style," but it was remarkably harmonious--the garment carefully chosen by a person with traditions.... Presently the servant came back and invited Adelle to go upstairs to the judge's library, as Judge Orcutt was not feeling well to-day, she explained. The study was like the room below, only larger, lighter, and well filled with books. The judge was sitting near the grate, in which was burning a soft-coal fire. He smiled on Adelle's entrance and apologized for not rising. "It's the east wind," he explained. "I've known it all my life, but it gets us old fellows, you know, on days like these!" Adelle took his thin hand and sat down in the seat he pointed out near the fire. The judge appeared to her to be no older than he had the first time she had seen him when she went to the probate court with her aunt. Then he had seemed to her child's eyes an old man, and now he was indubitably old and rather frail, with a clean-shaven, delicately moulded chin beneath his white mustache. Adelle was in no hurry to begin on her errand. She glanced about at the cheerful room with its rows of old books, presumably the works of those poet friends to whom the judge could now devote an uninterrupted leisure in communion. She looked at the old chairs and lounge and mahogany secretary, handed down, no doubt, from the judge's ancestors, for they antedated even the old judge. And then, through the little square panes in the windows, out to the chimney-pots on the slope of the hill, and across the harbor, with its tangle of wharves and masts, to the bay, through which the ships passed on into the ocean. She felt that it was exactly the right location for an old gentleman, who was done with the battles of life and yet wanted to remain within sight and sound of the battle-field.