But she might as well have asked help from the automobile. With a strange gesture of disgust and spurning the Judge held her coldly off. What he said was reiterated with majesty. He slowly raised the cigar in his hand and looked at it. Suddenly, with a bitter ejaculation, a short wry shake of the whole body, he flung it away. He passed the slender figure that had thrown itself miserably on the turf at his side and walked rapidly toward the house. No one saw the Judge that long summer evening; his study was vacant. The talking-machine was silent, his goldfish pool, where he often sat feeding the fishes, was deserted; and yet the whole place, forbidding and shadowed, seemed full of his personality. So Sard could not go to the house, she could not see Miss Aurelia, discuss the trial, conjecture as to Minga's and Dunstan's whereabouts. The girl, her body aching, her eyes half blind with surging thoughts, wandered to the little fruit orchard. It seemed to her that the gray ancient trees, like good little crones, welcomed her, and that the long grass and the rifts of leaves and patches of starred sky spoke to her. "You are part of us, Sard; we have struggled and fought, too; we have followed instincts and been smitten and wounded. You are like us, Sard, you have come into our laws." The part of the orchard where the girl threw herself down was dense and deep and its dimness cooled her heart and mind. Concealed from the murmurings of the house and garden, she lay pondering. The kind little old trees mothered her; she opened young eyes and stared pitifully at them, now clenching her hands and softly crying, now softly opening them and shuddering. "_As if I had done something wrong! As if I had done something wrong!_" Her own sentence beat and hammered into Sard's brain until it seemed as if she had done something wrong. So, sometimes, suspicion and influence can put guilt on a clean creature! Under the strange half-awakeness, the half-conscious struggles of a full-grown woman coming to life, before her there suddenly rose the Gorgon face of Society, of the thing called actual life. It turned her young heart and body to stone. The looks and words of Sard's father had been unmistakable; they had made her warm-hearted interest in the Man on the Place, the slow sense of delighted companionship, the mysterious attraction and trust, something shameful! "_As if I had done something wrong! As if I had done something wrong!_" Sard turned miserably, staring up at the sky. With the fairness, the willingness to face things peculiar to her, she could in a measure understand her father's anger and sense of outrage. The girl hardly rebelled against this, unjust as it was, but her helplessness with her own problem, the impossibility of proceeding on this strange and rare path without shame and mud-flinging, for the very path itself became evident to her.