"O John, don't talk so!" Mrs. Vernon let her work fall on the floor, and her face was pale and her lips quivered nervously. She had never known her husband to break out so forcibly from his habitual stern repression of feeling, and it frightened her. "It is simply what we must face sooner or later. Our girls--." The judge crowded down a rising passion, and for a moment there was perfect silence in the room. "Each of our girls one of these days will marry one of these society young men, such men as I am free to confess I never would choose for them." Mrs. Vernon was silent. She was astonished at her husband's words. "I see things in my court, Eliza, that convince me daily of the need of a great transformation in the city of Merton in its social life. I am simply appalled at the number of divorce cases. I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that the fast life lived by so many of the young people is utterly ruinous to soul and body. Hardly a case comes up that does not illustrate in some form the terrible influence of drink and gambling, much of it learned at the very parties where Claude is a frequent guest, at the very party, no doubt, where he is now." He rose and walked up and down the room again. Mrs. Vernon sat silent and agitated. "And I cannot help thinking of the people in Freetown. In the very heart of our Christian (as we call it) city there is a condition of lawlessness and impurity that very few realize. I see the results of it daily in my court, and my heart grows sick as I feel my powerlessness. Somehow--" Judge Vernon turned to his wife with a look and manner she had never known in him before. "Eliza, somehow I cannot help connecting the crime in Freetown, the dissipation and immorality in that district, with the same thing in what we call our best society. Somehow I am oppressed by the feeling that this city will suffer some great calamity even in its best homes because we have allowed such evils to grow up uncorrected in the right way. It seems to me sometimes as I sit in my place on the bench, that a judgment is hanging over this city, so fair in its outward appearance, yet so wrong in much of its human life." John Vernon, judge of the district court, had been a man who all his life gave the impression, even to the members of his own family, that he was a stern, self-controlled person, whose emotions were held in check with almost Puritan or Spartan coldness. His wife wondered in her heart at the unusual exhibition of his feeling this evening. Finally she asked, "The prisoner you sentenced to-day, John,--he is one of a large class, do you think?" "More than half the crime that is committed in the city comes from that class of young men." "And you sentenced him to twenty years' imprisonment?" "Yes; it was a brutal shooting affair. The other negro was lamed for life. Will probably lose an arm and foot."