Judge Thomas Van Dorn and his handsome wife were seen in the great hotels of New York and Boston, and in Europe more or less, though the acquaintances they made in Europe and in the East were no longer needed to fill their home. But the old settlers of Harvey maintained their siege. It was at a Twelfth Night festivity when young people from all over the Valley and from all over the West were masqueing in the great house, that Judge Van Dorn, to please a pretty girl from Baltimore whom the Van Dorns had met in Italy, shaved his mustache and appeared before the guests with a naked lip. The pursed, shrunken, sensuous lips of the cruel mouth showed him so mercilessly that Mrs. Van Dorn could not keep back a little scream of horror the first time he stood before her with his shaved lip. But she changed her scream to a baby giggle, and he did not know how he was revealed. So he went about ever after, preening himself that his smooth face gave him youth, and strutting inordinately because some of the women he knew told him he looked like a boy of twenty-five--instead of a man in his forties. He was always suave, always creakingly debonaire, always, even in his meannesses, punctilious and airy. So the old settlers sometimes were fooled by his attitude toward Margaret, his wife. He bore toward her in public that shallow polish of attention, which puzzled those who knew that they were never together by themselves when he could help it, that he spent his evenings at the City Club, and that often at the theater they sat almost back to back unconsciously during the whole performance. But after the curtain was down, the polite husband was the soul of attendance upon the beautiful wife--her coat, her opera glasses, her trappings of various sorts flew in and out of his eager hands as though he were a conjurer playing with them for an audience. For he was a proud man, and she was a vain woman, and they were striving to prove to a disapproving world that the bargain they had made was a good one. Yet the old settlers of Harvey felt instinctively that the price of their Judge's bargain was not so trifling a matter as at first the happy couple had esteemed it. The older people saw the big house glow with light as the town spread over the hill and prosperity blackened the Valley. The older people played their quiet games of bridge, by night, and said little. Judge Van Dorn polished the periods of his orations, kept himself like a race horse, strutted like a gobbler, showed his naked mouth, held himself always tightly in hand, kept his eye out for a pretty face, wherever it might be found, drank a little too much at night at the City Club; not much too much but a very little too much--so much that he needed something to brighten his eyes in the morning.