"Yes. He divides his time between us." After a few minutes he said, "You seem to anticipate no difficulty in the way of your conquering hero? Yet Miss Swendon by no means belongs to the warm-blooded, susceptible order of women. This Van Ness, as I remember him, is a starved, insignificant-looking fellow." "Oh, on the contrary! He has a very noble presence. Pliny is tall, with much dignity of carriage." "Pompous, eh? 'I am Sir Oracle'?" "Nothing of the kind. Rather deprecating manner, with a calm face, beaming blue eyes, and abundant fair hair and beard. The very finest of Saxon types, in fact." "Ah? But these reformers are apt to be underbred, irritable, with nasty peculiarities of habits and manner which they never have thought it worth while to cure. I suppose your friend is like his brethren?" "Now, Neckart, just wait until you see Van Ness. You'll be charmed, or I've no judgment. Most men are, and all women," laughing significantly. They rose at the moment. As they left the room Neckart caught sight in a mirror of his own dwarfed bulk and the massive head set in its black mane. He stopped and looked for an instant at himself fixedly, a thing which he had not done perhaps for years, and then walked on in silence beside the judge. When they parted in the street he wrote a line on a card and gave it to him. "In case I am not able to go out on the same train with you, this is the route to the farm," he said. He could scarcely be courteous. He was in a rage of indignation. Not, of course, that it mattered to him whether Jane married this or any other man whom she loved. She was only an acquaintance--more perhaps--his little friend. She must marry: he had thought of that often; and she would love--with a strength and fidelity beyond that of any woman he had ever known. He had often thought of that too. When the time came--years hence, perhaps--he would consult with her father as to the man. They must be satisfied that he would make her happy--they two. It must be a careful, cautious, slow matter. He might surely claim so much of a guardianship over her! He had studied her character very carefully, and appreciated it as a rare and delicate one; and he was very fond of the captain--very fond of the captain. But as for the plan of marriage--Mr. Neckart understood his own disgust at the judge, and accounted for it naturally. He had but little of the ordinary chivalric belief in woman's modesty and purity. Much knowledge of female lobbyists and literary tramps and champagne-tippling belles had shaken his faith, probably. "But this girl is the most innocent, sincerest thing God ever made," he said. "She is clean in thought and body and word."