“I don’t know how to commence it, seeing there’s no head nor tail, and I shall make an awful bungle, I presume, but what I want to say is this: You’ve got the wool pulled over your eyes good. I ain’t blind, nor deaf either, if one of my ears is shut up tight as a drum. I heard her soft-soaping you last night, making you think nobody did anything but her. It’s Lilian, I mean,” he continued, as he saw the mystified expression on Lawrence’s face. “Now, honest, didn’t she make you believe that she did about the whole; that is, did what women would naturally do in such a case?” Lawrence had received some such impression and as he had no reason for thinking Lilian would purposely deceive him, he roused up at once in her defense. “Everybody was kind, I presume,” he said, “but I must say that for a little, nervous creature as she is, Lilian acted nobly, standing fearlessly by until the worst was over, and then, when all the rest was gone, who was it sat watching me, but Lilian?” “Lilian! the devil! There, I have sworn, and I feel the better for it,” said the Judge, growing red in the face, and kicking over one of Mildred’s house plants with his heavy boot. “Thornton, you are a fool.” “Very likely,” answered Lawrence; “but I am certainly willing to be enlightened, and as you seem capable of doing it, pray continue.” “Never granted a request more willingly in my life,” returned the Judge. “Thornton, you certainly have some sense, or your father never would have married my daughter.” Lawrence could not tell well what that had to do with his having sense, but he was too anxious to interrupt the Judge, who continued: “You see, when Clubs crawled back to his door and told how you were dead, and when Hepsy screamed for help like a panther as she is, Mildred was the first to hear it, and she went tearing down the hill, while I went wheezing after, with Lilian following like a snail. I was standing by when Clubs told Milly you were dead, and then, Thornton, then there was a look on her face which made my very toes tingle, old as I am. Somehow the girl has got an idea that you think Lilian a little angel, and turning to her, she said, ‘Lilian, Lawrence is dead. Let us go to him together. He is mine now as much as yours,’ but do you think, boy, that she went?” “Yes, yes, I don’t know. Go on,” gasped Lawrence, whose face was white as ashes.