The judge shot her a hurt look.  It was no way to address an invalid of his standing.

“Chow, Spike,” said Wilbur, and would have guided him, but Winona was lightly before him.

Dave Cowan followed them from the little house.

“Present me to His Highness,” said he, after kneeling to kiss the hand of Winona.

* * * * *

The mid-afternoon hours beheld Spike Brennon again strangely occupying the wicker porch chair.  He even wielded the judge’s very own palm-leaf fan as he sat silent, sniffing at intervals toward the yellow rose.  Once he was seen to be moving his hand, with outspread fingers, before his face.

Winona had maneuvered her father from the chair, nor had she the grace to veil her subterfuge after she lured him to the back of the house.  She merely again had wished to know what, in plain terms, his ailment was; what, for that matter, had been the trouble with him for twenty years.  The judge fell speechless with dismay.

“You eat well and you sleep well, and you’re well nourished” went on the daughter, remorseless all at once.

“Little you know,” began the judge at last.

“But I shall know, Father.  Remember, I’ve learned things.  I’m going to take you in hand.  I may even have to be severe with you but all for your own good.”

She spoke with icy conviction.  There was a new, cold gleam in her prying eyes.  The judge suffered genuinely.

“I should think you had learned things!” he protested, miserably.  “For one thing, miss, that skirt ain’t a respectable garment.”

Winona slid one foot toward him.

“Pooh!  Don’t be silly!” Never before had Winona poohed her father.

“Cigarette fiend, too,” accused the judge.

“My husband got me to stop.”

“Strong drink,” added the judge.

“Pooh!” again breathed Winona.  “A little nip of something when you’re done up.”

“You talking that way!” admonished the twice-poohed parent.  “You that was always so——­”

“I’m not it any longer.”  She did a dance step toward the front door, but called back to him:  “Spike’s set his heart on that chair.  You’ll have to find something else for yourself.”

“’Twon’t always be so,” retorted the judge, stung beyond reason at the careless finality of her last words.  “You wait—­wait till the revolution sweeps you high and mighty people out of your places!  Wait till the workers take over their rights—­you wait!”

But Winona had not waited.  She had gone to confer on Wilbur Cowan a few precious drops of that which had caused her father to put upon her the stigma of alcoholic intemperance.

“It’s real genuine dandelion wine,” she told him.  “One of the nurses got it for me when we left the boat in Boston.  Her own mother made it, and she gave me the recipe, and it isn’t a bit of trouble.  I’m going after dandelions to-morrow, Spike and I. Of course we’ll have to be secret about it.”