He trembled with anxiety on the edge of his chair. The savagery of the music alarmed him. When Prue walked out with her husband the old Doctor was distressed by her beauty. Then they danced and his heart thumped; but subtly it was persuaded to thump in the measure of that unholy Maxixe. He did not know that outside in the street before the two windows stood two exiled fathers watching in bitter loneliness. He saw a little love drama displayed, and reminded himself that, after all, some critics said that the Song of Solomon was a kind of wedding drama or dance. After all, Mrs. Hippisley was squired by her perfectly proper and very earnest young husband--though Orton in his black clothes was hardly more than her shifting shadow. The old preacher had been studying his Cruden, and bolstering himself up, too, with the very Scriptural texts that Prue had written out for her stiff-necked father. He had met other texts that she had not known how to find. The idea came to the preacher that, in a sense, since God made everything He must have made the dance, breathed its impulse into the clay. This daughter of Shiloh was an extraordinarily successful piece of workmanship. There was nothing very wicked surely about that coquettish bending of her head, those playful escapes from her husband's embrace, that heel-and-toe tripping, that lithe elusiveness, that joyous psalmody of youth. Prue was so pretty and her ways so pretty that the old man felt the pathos of beauty, so fleet, so fleeting, so lyrical, so full of--Alas! The tears were in his eyes, and he almost applauded with the others when the dance was finished. He bowed vaguely in the direction of the anxious Prue and made his way out. She felt rebuked and condemned and would not be comforted by the praise of others. She did not know that the old preacher had encountered on the sidewalk Judge Hippisley. Doctor Brearley had forgotten that the judge had not yet ordered his own decision reversed, and he thought he was saying the unavoidable thing when he murmured: "Ah, Judge, how proud you must be of your dear son's dear wife. I fancy that Miriam, the prophetess, must have danced something like that on the banks of the Red Sea when the Egyptians were overthrown." Then he put up the umbrella he always carried and stumbled back to his parsonage under the star-light. His heart was dancing a trifle, and he escaped the scene of wrath that broke out as soon as he was away. For William Pepperall had a lump in his throat made up of equal parts of desire to cry and desire to fight, and he said to Judge Hippisley with all truculence: "Look here, Judge! I understand you been jawin' round this town about my daughter not being all she'd ought to be. Now I'm goin' to put a stop to that jaw of yours if I have to slam it right through the top of your head. If you want to send me to jail for contemp' of court, sentence me for life, because that's the way I feel about you, you fat old--"