“What is his name?” asked the judge, with a persistence very uncommon in him.

Philip Alston turned now and glanced at him with an easy, almost bantering smile.

“I don’t like to tell you his name, because you—­with a good many other honestly mistaken people—­are most unjustly prejudiced against him.  And then you know well enough that I am speaking of my respected and trusted friend, Monsieur Jean Lafitte.”

The judge dropped the lace as if it had burnt his hand.  He went back to his seat by the window in silence.  He sat down heavily and looked at Philip Alston in perplexity, rubbing his great shock of rough grizzled hair the wrong way as he always did when worried.  His thoughts were plainly to be read on his open, rugged face.  This liking of Philip Alston’s for a man under a national ban was an old subject of worry and perplexity.  Yet Alston was always as frank and as firm about it as he had been just now, and the judge’s confidence in him was absolute.  Robert Knox’s own character must have changed greatly before he could have doubted the sincerity of any one whom he had known as long, as intimately, and as favorably as he had known Philip Alston.  We all judge others by ourselves,—­whether we do it consciously or not,—­since we have no other way of judging.  And the judge himself was so simple, so sincere, so essentially honest, that he could not doubt one who was in a way a member of his own family.  And then he was absent-minded, unobservant, easy-going, indolent, and the slave of habit, as such a nature is apt to be.  Moreover, he was not always master of the slight power of observation which had been given him.  That very day, while on his way home from the court-house, he had stopped at a cabin where liquor was sold.  As a consequence, this sudden touch of uneasiness which aroused him for an instant was forgotten nearly as suddenly as it came.  So that after looking bewilderedly at Philip Alston once or twice, he now began to nod and doze.

III

“Philip Alston, gentleman”

Philip Alston still stood before the candle-stand.  His gaze rested on the girl’s radiant face with wistful tenderness.  It was plain that he thought nothing of all these rich, rare gifts which he had given her, save only as they gave her pleasure and might win from her another loving look, another butterfly kiss on his cheek.

As he stood there that night in the great room of Cedar House, before the firelight and under the beams of the swinging lamps, he scarcely appeared to need the help of any gift in winning a woman’s love.  His was a presence to hold the gaze.  He was very tall and straight and slender, yet most finely proportioned.  The heavy hair, falling back from his handsome face and tied in a queue, must once have been as black as Ruth’s own; surely, no paler shade could have become so silvery white.  His eyes, also, were