"Sho' now!" he exclaimed, looking back with his thick, blue-black lips framed to a whistle. "Muss-a been pow'ful guilty ef _he_ couldn't git him off. Ah reck'n dem yuthah lawyahs 'cluded dey wanter tek Marse Harry down--he done put it ovah _dem_ so off'n--en dey jes' tek dat 'cused man, en fool eroun', en fool eroun', tell dey done _prove_ it on him!" But 'Lige's sage reflection upon the situation brought no smile to Echo Allen's face. At length the horses came to a great double-gate, lighted with heavy wrought-iron lamps, opening on a curving drive, into which they turned, to swing panting up to a wide-porched mansion set in a grove of oaks and acacias. This was "Midfields," the home of the Allens for four generations and of the Beverlys before them. Its wide wings and columned front spoke of old colony days, as did its name of a time when rolling acres of tobacco instead of suburban streets surrounded it. Twilight was drifting thickly over it now, and the box-hedged garden, with its plenteous rose-shrubs and wild sun-dial, was purpled with shadow. Echo jumped down without assistance and ran into the hall, throwing off her hat and coat and pausing before a glass to pat into place the rebellious whorls of her springing, gold-brown hair before she entered the dimly-lighted library. It was a wide, pleasant room, with tradition and gentle birth in every line of its furnishing. The table held an old China lamp of gilt and _lapis-lazuli_ blue, and the simple, colonial book-cases were of rich-veined mahogany which held the same shimmering, tawny lights as Echo's hair and had leaded-glass doors in key with the silver, glass-prismed candle-sticks on the mantel-piece. A huge old English screen of painted leather stood at one side. On the dull green walls were framed steel engravings of the ancestral home of the Allens in Dorsetshire and of that sturdy ancestor, in lace and peruke, whose rugged signature is on the Declaration. The place had but one modern touch--a splendid portrait of Echo herself that hung between two great windows--the canvas whose photograph at that moment lay face-down in Harry Sevier's inner office. In the room sat her father, the Judge, perusing a magazine. He was a pale, placid man, straight and grey as a silver-birch, with ivory, distinguished features that suggested an old daguerreotype and seemed to call for a silk-velvet waistcoat and a stock. He tossed the magazine aside as she came to him and stooping, in a swift birdlike way she had, dropped a kiss on the top of his billowy, grey hair. "There you are," she chided, "ruining your poor eyes with fine print in this wretched light!" She turned the reading-lamp higher and drew the curtains. As she pulled the heavy folds together they swept from its place a heavy brass bowl filled with Marechal Niel roses, and it fell with a crash onto a frail Italian desk of dark rosewood quaintly inlaid with designs in lighter colour, which sat in a corner.