The Judge, twitching the paper, looked at his son. "She ought to hear it," he growled; "ring it again." Dunstan suddenly dived under the table, feeling for the button. "Blame not the damsel," came the lad's voice, this time near Sard's feet. "Cuss the battery if you must cuss." He emerged from under the table and catapulted into the kitchen, where he nearly upset the cook, entering with a tray of smoking Sally Lunn. His father followed him with a cold eye of disgust. "Does he think that sort of thing amusing?" he inquired. The sacks under the Judge's dull eyes had a slightly swelled, feverish look. The eyes themselves were leaden gooseberry and boiled hard in the pupil. The Judge's nose, aristocratic and sharp, held a fearful look of pride, and the grizzled hair, scant on his head, was heavy on ears and eyebrows. Sard had often thought that the men and women brought before her father must have had dread long before the slightly nasal voice deliberately twanged out the sentence. But as a little girl she remembered her mother always said to her, "Baby, we love Foddie, don't we? Foddie won't send _us_ with the naughty pwisoners to pwison. Foddie won't take away all our nice toys and put us in dungeons." There was invariably a smell of cologne and little soft tickles of curls that went with this, and a rustle of spreading ruffled silks and laces. With these things, part of their pretty feminine play, Sard could hear the whisper, that strange mother whisper, the whisper which is back of the building of the whole world, the whisper which is responsible for the best men and the best women, for all greatness and heroism and sometimes for the weakness and foolishness and decadence--The Mother-whisper. "We love Foddie, little Sard, don't we? We aren't afraid of him--he won't send us to pwison." Then over their own clasping had come the man's bear hug and little laughs and screams from her pretty mother. Then Sard had always gone gravely and happily away to play. Dunstan returned from the kitchen with the air of news. "Cook hath secured the main part of the breakfast booty, but thy maiden hath left--she answers not to her name in the scullery." Miss Aurelia Bogart, the Judge's sister, sighed deeply. "Poor Dora, she never came in at all last night--she--I--you--well, she is taking this thing very hard--I suppose," with another sigh, "it is natural." Dunstan grinned. "You are right, Aunt Reely; right, delicate nun! It is not unnatural to be sad when your only brother is indicted for murder. So the fair nymph never came in at all last night? Queer about these women." Dunstan winked at his sister, then stared blankly into his father's equally blank face. "I say, Pop, are you really going to jug him for life, meaning the tow-headed murderer brother of our esteemed waitress?"