He leaned back in the chair with his cigar in his mouth and his eyes directed toward the opposite wall, where in an oval frame hung the life-size portrait of an old bulldog.  The eyes were blue and watery and as full of suffering as a seats; from the extremity of the lower jaw a tooth stood up like a shoemaker’s peg; and over the entire face was stamped the majesty, the patience, and the manly woes of a nature that had lived deeply and too long.  The Judge’s eyes rested on this comrade face.

The events of the day had left him troubled.  Any sermon on the prodigal always touches men; even if it does not prick their memories, it can always stir their imaginations.  Whenever he heard one, his mind went back to the years when she who afterwards became Rowan’s mother had cast him off, so settling life for him.  For after that experience he had put away the thought of marriage.  “To be so treated once is enough,” he had said sternly and proudly.  True, in after years she had come back to him as far as friendship could bring her back, since she was then the wife of another; but every year of knowing her thus had only served to deepen the sense of his loss.  He had long since fallen into the habit of thinking this over of Sunday evenings before going to bed, and as the end of life closed in upon him, he dwelt upon it more and more.

These familiar thoughts swarmed back to-night, but with them were mingled new depressing ones.  Nothing now perhaps could have caused him such distress as the thought that Rowan and Isabel would never marry.  All the love that he had any right to pour into any life, he had always poured with passionate and useless yearnings into Rowan’s—­son, of the only woman he had ever loved—­the boy that should have been his own.

There came an interruption.  A light quick step was heard mounting the stairs.  A latch key was impatiently inserted in the hall door.  A bamboo cane was dropped loudly into the holder of the hat-rack; a soft hat was thrown down carelessly somewhere—­it sounded like a wet mop flung into a corner; and there entered a young man straight, slender, keen-faced, with red hair, a freckled skin, large thin red ears, and a strong red mouth.  As he stepped forward into the light, he paused, parting the haircut of his eyes and blinking.

“Good evening, uncle,” he said in a shrill key.

“Well, sir.”

Barbee looked the Judge carefully over; he took the Judge’s hat and cane from the table and hung them in the hall; he walked over and picked up the newspaper from between the Judge’s legs and placed it at his elbow; he set the ash tray near the edge of the table within easy reach of the cigar.  Then he threw himself into a chair across the room, lighted a cigarette, blew the smoke toward the ceiling like the steam of a little whistle signalling to stop work.

“Well, uncle,” he said in a tone in which a lawyer might announce to his partner the settlement of a long-disputed point, “Marguerite is in love with me!”