Jane came to him, and in a few moments had the beast subdued and lying panting at her feet, his bloodshot eye still fixed on Van Ness. She was pale and trembling, offered her handkerchief to tie up the wounded hand, and was humble in her apologies; but Van Ness knew all the while that her sympathies were with the dog. Judge Rhodes had heard the scuffle, and arrived now, out of breath, and violent in his abuse of poor Bruno. "Why you keep such an ill-conditioned beast, Jane, I cannot understand," he cried as he swabbed and tied the wound. Mr. Van Ness beamed down unruffled on the stout little man: "You are always unjust to dogs, Rhodes. Now, I should say that our friend Bruno was one of the Brahmin caste--fine-natured and well-bred as a rule. Liable to mistakes, perhaps.--I am right, Miss Swendon?" and he beamed down in his turn on Jane, who sat on the bank, stroking the dog's muzzle as it lay on her knee. She forced a smile which proved a failure, said that he was right, and that she must hurry before them to the house. She stopped as soon as she was out of sight to hug the dog with a sob: "But we are not wild beasts, are we, Bruno?" She felt the dog's insane desire to tear off this amiability, this cloying gentleness of the newcomer, and find what was beneath. It was just as it used to be long ago when prim, polite little misses came to play with her--white, pink-eyed poodles consorting with a big Newfoundland. She used to feel clumsy and worsted beside them, possessed by the devil too to scare and disgust them. Yet she knew herself more right than they all the time. When she sat at the head of the dinner-table an hour or two later, soft silken drapery having taken the place of the soft woollen, and her usual calm good temper on the surface instead of pallor and tears, her secret mood was very much the same. Mr. Neckart sat apart from her: he spoke little, and that only to the captain, who was eager about the political question of the day. Judge Rhodes, dropping his voice, poured into her ear eulogiums on Van Ness. "Did you see him smiling down on that brute? Now, how did he know but he had given him the hydrophobia?" "I appreciated the self-control," smiling. "So did Bruno. It drove him mad." "Self-control? I tell you, it's super-human! I've thought sometimes it was a divine power sustaining him. Why, I saw that man at his mother's deathbed. She lay in his arms, and he sang to her--hymns, you know--sang to her in a clear, unbroken voice until her spirit had passed out of hearing. I couldn't have done it, even for a stranger." "I am sure you could not," said Miss Swendon. "He sinks self out of sight wholly, you see. Now, he had a dog once--a hound like yours--brought him up. It was touching to see them together--the devotion of the poor brute. Well, he sold him, and gave the hundred dollars to his State Home for Children. He could not afford such a luxury as the dog's love, he said, while these poor wretches needed so much."