“Against Mr. Jelnik?  But, good heavens, why?  Why?” I was beginning to get angry.  “Let me see:  I am to make myself odious to Mr. Jelnik, and I am to refuse to allow a physician to run his car through a barren strip of weeds and sand, because they are her relatives and she hated her relatives.  I am to vex the souls of harmless Christians with bill-posters of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and I’m to pay taxes on a lot that’s been turned into a cemetery for a hound dog.  I’m to fight St. Polycarp’s Church, for a couple of chromos I should probably loathe.—­I don’t like pictures of cardinal virtues, anyhow.  It altogether depends on who possesses them as to whether I can stand for the cardinal virtues themselves.”

“Faith looking up, and Charity looking down, and Hope hanging to an anchor, something like Britannia-Rules-the-Waves.  Make the church keep them, please, Sophy!” begged Alicia.

Judge Gatchell made an odd noise in his throat.

“One of my little granddaughters, taken to Saint Polycarp’s by her mother, asked, ’Mamma, who is that big woman up there with the pick-axe?’ And they told her,” said the Judge, scathingly, “they told her it was Hope!

“When the vestry came to me about the case, I reminded them that Aholah and Aholibah were damned for doting upon paintings on the wall, painted in vermilion, which in plain English is Scarlett!” A covenanting gleam shot into his frosty eyes, and the old fighting Scotch blood showed for a second in his lank cheek.  He was a godly man, and when he saw confusion in the ranks of the Philistines, he rejoiced.

“I can’t help who was damned,” said I.  “My job is to live in peace with my neighbors.  St. Polycarp’s people may hang their Virtues wherever they please, for all of me.”

Did a faint, faint shade of regret flit over the parchment-like face?  It seemed so to me.  But he said, composedly: 

“You must act according to your best judgment.  And now, please, let us go back to Mr. Nicholas Jelnik.”

We rather prided ourselves upon the possession of so pleasant a neighbor, and we said so.  He had helped us with our garden, and it was he who selected the spot upon which the resurrected Love should be set up.

“Ah, yes, the statue, brought from Italy by Richard Hynds, a great grandfather of his.  Did he tell you anything about Richard?” asked the judge.

“Nothing.”

“I shall have to go a long way back, more than a hundred years, to make you understand,” said the judge.  “When I was a boy some of the oldest folk here in Hyndsville used to say that Hynds House never should have come to Freeman Hynds, Mrs. Scarlett’s father; but to Richard Hynds, his elder brother—­that same Richard whose initials are cut in the base of the statue he brought in his pagan godlessness from Italy, and which his brother afterward buried, wishing to remove all trace of him and his follies.