The Judge wore a wearied and vaguely bewildered look as he sat down and wiped his forehead with a large, clean white handkerchief. "It's all different from what I thought--it's all different," he said. "Things often are," remarked Tom, "oftener than not." Rupert and Sheba glanced at each other questioningly and listened with anxious eyes. "And it's different in a different way from what I expected," the Judge went on. "They might have said and done a dozen things I should have been sort of ready for, but they didn't. Somehow it seemed as if--as if the whole thing didn't matter." Tom got up and began to walk about. "That's not the way things begin that are going to rush through," he said. Sheba followed him and slipped her hand through his arm. "Do you think," she faltered, "that perhaps we shall not get the money at all, Uncle Tom?" Tom folded her hand in his--which was easily done. "I'm afraid that if we do get it," he answered, "it will not come to us before we want it pretty badly--the Lord knows how badly." For every day counts in the expenditure of a limited sum, and on days of discouragement Tom's calculation of their resources left him a troubled man. When Judge Rutherford had gone Rupert sat with Sheba in the scented summer darkness. He drew his chair opposite to hers and took one of her hands in both of his own. "Suppose I have done a wrong thing," he said. "Suppose I have dragged you and Uncle Tom into trouble?" "I am glad you came," in a quick, soft voice. "I am glad you came." And the slight, warm fingers closed round his. He lifted them to his lips and kissed them over and over again. "Are you glad I came?" he murmured. "Oh, Sheba! Sheba!" "Why do you say 'Oh, Sheba'?" she asked. "Because I love you so--and I am so young--and I don't know what to do. You know I love you, don't you?" She leaned forward so that he saw her lovely gazelle eyes lifted and most innocently tender. "I want you to love me," she said; "I could not bear you not to love me." He hesitated a second, and then suddenly pressed his glowing face upon her palm. "But I don't love you as Uncle Tom loves you, Sheba," he said. "I love you--young as I am--I love you--differently." Her swaying nearer to him was a sweetly unconscious and involuntary thing. Their young eyes drowned themselves in each other. "I want you," she said, the note of a young ring-dove answering her mate murmuring in her voice, "I want you to love me--as you love me. I love your way of loving me." "Darling!" broke from him, his boy's heart beating fast and high. And their soft young lips were, through some mystery of power, drawn so near to each other that they met like flowers moved to touching by the summer wind.