The judge, noticing her roving eyes, remarked genially,--"I like to look out over the place where I have been working so many years!" "It's nice here," Adelle replied. There was much more in the room and the house that Adelle vaguely felt--an air of peace, of gentle and serene contemplation, that came from the man himself, who had taken what life had offered him and turned it to good in the alembic of his peculiar nature. It had been a sound and sweet life, on the whole, and this was a sweet retreat, smelling of old books and old meetings, fragrant with memories of another world, another people! This fruit of the spirit, which is all that is left from living, Adelle could now feel acutely, if she could not express it fitly in words. And she was grateful for it. She knew that at last she had come to the right place for the solution of her problem, and she did not hasten. Neither did the judge hurry her to her errand. Evidently he recalled who she was, and his keen eyes probably read more of the secrets of those years since her last appearance in his court--extravagantly dressed, almost insolent, to listen indifferently to his severe homily upon Clark's Field--than she suspected. So they chatted for a few minutes about the view, the city, the old house, and then, as Adele still seemed tongue-tied, the judge remarked,-- "My servant gave your name as Mrs. Clark--did she not make a mistake?" "No," Adelle said, "That is what I shall call myself now--Mrs. Adelle Clark." The judge murmured something behind his hand. Hers was another of these modern mishaps, it seemed, falsely called marriages. Each case of divorce gave his old heart a little stab, wounding a loyalty to a beautiful ideal that he had kept intact. But he was old enough and wise enough, having judged men and women all his life, not to pronounce judgment on the most intimate and secret of all human affairs. He waited for Adelle to tell her story, and presently she began. "Judge Orcutt," she said, "I want to tell you something and ask your advice because I feel that you will know what to do." With this introduction she proceeded to retell her story, the one she had told that morning to the officers of the trust company. But having been over it once she told it much better to the judge, more coherently, more fully, with many small, intimate, revealing touches that she had omitted before. It was easier for her to talk to the old man, who listened with warm, understanding eyes, and nodded his white head when she cut to the quick of things as if he understood why without being told everything precisely. She felt that she could tell him everything, all her own life, all that she was but now beginning to comprehend and see as a whole. He had for her the lure of the confessor, and Adelle needed a confessor.