The lad stood there silent. The Judge recognized the famous lawyer with a curt gesture. "Sit down, sit down. I'm trying to make this young man understand that he is responsible for his sister's character and behavior; that they both live under one law, the law of a good name." Dunstan's face was afire. He stood facing his father. "You call it a good name to suggest that my sister needs my protection?" asked the lad ironically. "Ah, a good name," the boy choked. "A name that means finicking and fussing and being afraid and continually thinking of evil. Well, I don't believe either Sard or I want that kind of good name." He finished with a curious gesture of despair, a gesture that Shipman, standing soberly by, understood at once. He loved the young fellow for it, for it was Sard's own gesture. "Give us realities, realities of sympathy and help and cleanness and good will. Do not ask us to bow our heads under your standards of what appears well." That was what the gesture said. "Leave the room," commanded the Judge, "leave the room." Dunstan, with a strange little look at the lawyer, went out. Judge Bogart turned; in his hand was a box of cigars. "I don't know what's come over the young people of to-day." His voice was brassy with anger. Shipman took a cigar, held it lightly, then with a gleam of eyes, half closed, to watch the match. "Young people," he said, "must often wonder what has come over us." The two men deliberately measured each other. Then the talk turned to the O'Brien case. What they said was purely superficial, but the lawyer, raising interesting questions of technicality, wondered if he was not perhaps the means of saving Sard a lecture. A Winged Victory must have gotten to bed by this time. Watts smiled. When at last he rose to go he gestured toward the disheveled condition of his walking things. "I ought to have apologized. We got caught in a bog looking for pink pearls." He was mirthful at his own share in the escapade. "Quite a youthful time," he laughed. "Humph!" Judge Bogart eyed the other man curiously. "You found some fine pearls?" "Your man Colter picked up one. Seemed to know how to look; he seems rather well informed." The lawyer paused. Perhaps this was an opening. Judge Bogart reached up to snap out the light. "If you're going to walk up the mountain," he remarked curtly, "the back door is your best exit." CHAPTER XVIII THE TAWNY TROOP METHOD