"I met her several weeks ago, out at Captain Carter's. But I did not see her again, that is to speak to her, until about a week ago. In one way I have known her, you might say, but a week; yet I feel that I have known her a long time, always, in fact. I--I--well, I loved her at first sight." Marley dropped his face at this speech, for it seemed that he had made it too sentimental; he had a feeling that the judge so regarded it. He sat and picked at the braids of straw in his hat. "And have you spoken to her?" asked the judge. "Oh yes!" said Marley, looking up quickly. "And she--?" "She loves me." The judge closed his eyes as if in pain. Then he stirred, the paper dropped from his fingers, and he drew himself up in his chair, as if to deal with the matter. "How old are you, Mr. Marley?" he inquired. "I am twenty-two," said Marley, confidently, as if this maturity must incline the judge in his favor. "I cast my first vote for McKinley." He thought this, too, would help matters, and possibly it did. "You have completed your education?" "I graduated this summer from the Ohio Wesleyan." "And what are you doing now, or proposing to do?" "Just now, I am studying law," he announced. "I'm going to make the law my profession." Marley looked up with a high faith in this final appeal, but even that did not impress the judge as Marley felt a tribute thus delicately implied should affect him. "You are reading with a preceptor, I take it?" "Yes, sir, in Mr. Powell's office." Judge Blair looked at Marley as if he were deciding what to do with him. After he had looked a while he gazed off across the street, drumming with his finger-tips on the arm of his chair. Presently, without turning, and still gazing abstractedly into the distance--and in that instant Marley remembered that he had seen the judge stare at the ceiling of the court room in exactly the same way while sentencing a culprit--he began to speak.