Judge Owen _did_ know him by the description, but too well! That short good-looking young man with the curly hair, the moustache and the light-gray clothes, was as certainly the man he had forbidden his house and the company of his daughter, as his own name was Owen and his dignity a judicial one! Here was an outrage!--witness it ye fathers whose daughters do not always obey your high behests. Here was a call for the exercise of the highest qualities of authority!--bear witness to that, all you good people who have at one time or another dragged your wives out of churches because you did not like the ritual, or who have dragged them _into_ churches because suitors armed with money-bags or aristocratic names or political influence, stood within and beckoned! Here was a necessity for proving what Judge Owen had only a day or two before so loudly asserted--his ascendency in his own household. Here was an opportunity to show to the public that Judge Owen, arbiter of the legal destinies of his fellow-men when they did not range beyond a certain insignificant number of dollars, was at once a Solon and a Draco in his own domestic relations. Great men _will_ develope themselves at some period or other in their lives, however they may previously have been kept back by adverse circumstances; and Judge Owen had never yet enjoyed the opportunity of showing half his mighty energies. Armed with the double power of a parent and the law, he felt that he could combat anything--even a young and delicate woman: gifted with a rigid sense of right which rose above all personal considerations, he felt that to that right he could sacrifice anything--even the privacy and sanctity of his domestic relations. The great men of old had done something in that way: Brutus had laid his son, without a tear or a groan, on the altar of his country; Virginius had slain his daughter when her perilled honor demanded that violent deed; and only half a century before his own time, Napoleon had given up a beloved Empress and married a royal nobody, for the sake of preserving the dynasty that his people so demanded. It only remained for William Owen, Judge, to emulate those great examples and drag his daughter out of the theatre!