"And I--I can not even see her?" stammered Marley, in his despair. "I have not said that," the judge said. "I shall always be pleased to extend to you the hospitality of my house, of course; but I would not consider it necessary for you to see her regularly, or intimately, and I certainly would not want you to monopolize her society to the exclusion of other young men with whom she has been in the habit of associating." Marley sat there, after this long harangue, with his head downcast. He sat and turned his hat round and round. At last he did look up with an appeal in his eyes, but when he saw that the judge was sitting there, as he had at first, sunk in his chair, breathing heavily and looking at him out of those sluggish eyes, he arose. He stood a moment, and looked off across the street somewhere, anywhere. Then he smote one hand lightly into the other, turned, and said: "Well--good afternoon, Judge Blair." "Good afternoon, Mr. Marley," the judge replied. He watched Marley go down the walk and out of the gate. CHAPTER IX A FILIAL REBUKE "Father!" Judge Blair turned and saw Lavinia standing in the wide front door. Her face was red, her eyes were flashing, her arms hung straight and tense at her sides. The judge stirred uneasily in his chair. "Oh!" she cried, rigidly clenching her little fists. "What have you done! You have sent him away!" "Come here, my daughter," he said. Lavinia moved toward him, halting each moment, then taking a few nervous steps forward. At last she stood before him, challenging, defiant. "Sit down, Lavinia, and listen," implored the judge. "You have sent him away!" she repeated. "You were harsh and cruel and unkind to him!" "Lavinia!" cried the judge, flushing with the anger parents call by different names. There was now a peremptory quality in his tone. But the girl did not heed him. "Oh, how could you!" she went on, "how could you! Think how you must have wounded him! You not only reproached him with being poor, but you discouraged him as to his prospects! Do you think I cared for that? Do you think I couldn't have waited? Do you think I can't wait anyhow? What had you when you proposed to mama? You were poor--you had no prospects; you had no more right--" "Lavinia! Lavinia!" the judge commanded, grasping the arms of his chair in an effort to rise. "You are beside yourself! You don't know what you are saying!" "And you pretended to be doing it all for my happiness, too! Oh! oh! oh!" Her anger vented itself impotently in these exclamations, and then her mother, white and alarmed, appeared in the doorway behind her. "Lavinia," she said quietly. The girl trembled violently, then whirled about, pressed her hands to her face, and ran in, brushing by her mother in the doorway. Mrs. Blair glanced after her irresolutely. Then she went to her husband. "Be calm, dear," she said.