Since that unfortunate day in the fall there had been something else than reserve to make him walk hastily past the Willard place, to keep him away from the little social gatherings in the meeting-house vestry, and he avoided Sylvena Willard with as much anxiety as she appeared to avoid him. He was as ashamed of that blow as he would have been of a crime. Now that the rage of the provocation had departed, he knew that his act had been a vulgar street affray--there was no other word for it in his vocabulary. When some of the jesters in the attorneys’ room at county court mentioned the affair at the December term with many humorous inquiries, he was so overwhelmed with shame that he asked continuance for most of his cases and hurried home. Yet he heard other things at that term of court that disquieted him more. “Why, Look, I _know_ it!” one of his lawyer friends had insisted, when he ventured to remonstrate at certain gossip. “I don’t know how much property Judge Willard has got, nor what resources are back of him. But I do know that he is as pinched for ready money as the devil. I can talk with you without it’s going any farther; but being a trustee in a savings bank and a director in a national bank, I come pretty near knowing when a man is hustling hard for loans, and you can tell how hard he is hustling from the kind of collateral he is offering. I’ve got nothing against the Judge, but I’m afraid he’s in over his head with Bradish. Your Bradish has been a country plunger for a long time--and the country plunger is the worst of the breed. He thinks he knows it all and is working the stock market at arm’s length. I know, myself, that one bucket shop let him down for sixteen thousand in a single blind pool. Willard seems to have played fox with you folks in Palermo through it all, and, of course, he’s had a great start of you with his reputation and all that. But if he’s your town treasurer, as I hear he is, and custodian of about all the funds of widows and orphans and old codgers in your town, give him a looking over and do it right away. You can’t afford to let even a Willard dump the whole of you--especially when it looks to me as though this Bradish is the chap responsible for getting him into this mess and has gobbled most of the money.” But even with that warning to spur him, Squire Look allowed the weeks to pass without setting about any thorough investigation of Judge Willard’s finances. If he were any other than Seth Look’s boy---Hiram Look’s brother, he felt that the case would be different. Whenever he paused in his work to ponder on the matter and on his duty to the citizens, he groaned under his breath and put the thing away from him once more. And as the winter went on the Squire found less and less time to think upon anything but his own matters.