A verdict for his client was almost immediately rendered. Then he stepped out into the crowd, to be met on all sides by extended hands and enthusiastic compliments. People that had always studiously avoided him, now sought to catch his eye; gentlemen who had never vouchsafed him more than a stiff nod, now waited to give him a friendly hand-grasp and a few congratulatory words. One of the magnates of the neighborhood publicly stamped him, as it were, with the seal of his high approbation, by engaging him for a few moments in conversation, and then parting from him with an intimation that he might expect an early invitation to dinner. Turning away from the dog-day smile of this personage,--late and sultry,--Bergan encountered the meaning gaze of a pair of blear eyes. "Sudden change of weather," remarked Dick Causton, dryly. "'it never rains but it pours.' You are in a heavy shower, Mr. Arling." And with unwonted consideration, Dick waited till Bergan had passed on, before he muttered, "_In picciol tempo passa ogni gran pioggia_,--a heavy shower is soon over." Dr. Remy came next. "I never sing in chorus," said he, shrugging his shoulders, and putting his hands behind him; "I shall keep my compliments for a day of dearth. But what a weathercock is public opinion!" Yet the change was not altogether so sudden and radical as it appeared. Bergan's upright, independent course of conduct, so quietly persisted in, through all these months, despite every discouragement, had at last begun to tell upon the prejudices of the community. Mrs. Lyte's warm advocacy and indignant protest, in her small circle, had also had its weight. Probably both would have availed much earlier, but for the curiously infelicitous language in which Dr. Remy had all along chosen to couch his responses to such persons as had approached him in relation to Bergan's character and habits. "As talented a fellow as ever lived," he replied to one inquirer,--"and as deep a one. Ah! he knows well what he's about!" "Sober?" he answered another,--"certainly; as sober as an anchorite. I hope he will keep so." "Mr. Arling is my neighbor and friend, as friendship goes," he said to another; "I neither make, nor listen to, derogatory remarks about him. If you want confirmation for your prejudice, go elsewhere. I am not in that line." Intentionally or not, Dr. Remy's cool cynicism rather damaged than helped Bergan's cause.