The lady made as if to rise and leave the table. Her knees trembled, her stiffly starched white skirts rustled, she was the old-time picture of femininity swimming on the seas of its own emotions and expecting to be rescued by the very man who had stirred up the storm. But Miss Aurelia, with her flutter of defiance and tears, had to pass the inexorable judicial eyes. "You are sure the man Colter accompanied them?" asked the Judge in the low tones he reserved for hardened offenders. But now that screeching, protesting thing that is intrenched in the soul and body of every woman burst forth. Miss Aurelia was no longer early Victorian. She was late--Margot-Tennant, the pent-up protester, the savage that sleeps under the threshold. She rose and shrieked defiance. "Sure?" demanded Miss Aurelia, ruffling, "sure? That's what you wanted to know all along! Well then, why didn't you forbid it, if you were afraid? You know how Sard does things. How could I help it? Have you ever told Sard not to be seen with this man? I have worried about it all day. Not that I fear for Sard," poor Miss Aurelia saw too late the curious gleam in the Judge's eyes, "only she doesn't realize that people will talk. The men in the Morris bank--and all--why, only yesterday----" but the reminiscence trailed off like a whiff of smoke in the blue haze of Miss Aurelia's mind. "Why should you ask me such a thing?" she said. Her inflection was enough to damn the entire expedition. Judge Bogart sat back in his chair. He raised his eyes to the ceiling with the air of registering an important bit of evidence. "Umph," he said slowly, "just what I thought." He pulled down his lower lip, and looked at his sister. "Precisely what I thought. It seems that I," repeated the Judge, staring, "must take my own daughter in hand." "Now, now," said Miss Aurelia, with a frightened attempt to palliate; "nobody needs to take Sard in hand. Why, she, they----" But her brother waved her to some strange dungeon existing in his own mind. "You are acting in the capacity of Sard's mother," he said grandiloquently; "you have failed. It was for you to have watched over her and to have kept her from entangling matters, the sort of thing a hot-headed girl gets into. You ought to know----" The Judge grimly paused. But Miss Reely felt that it was not entirely discreet to understand this inference that she "ought to know."