Tom looked up, flushing warmly.

“Why, who’s been such a blamed fool as to tell you?” he demanded.

“You have heard it?”

“It isn’t worth hearing.  I called Jerry Pollard up at once, and he swore he was all wrong—­the girl herself exonerates you.  Nobody believed it.”

Nicholas crushed the brim of his hat in a sudden grip.

“Some believe it,” he returned slowly.  He sat down at the table, smiling gratefully at the judge’s protestations.

“They aren’t all like you, sir,” he declared.  “I wish they were.  This world would be a little nearer heaven—­a little less like hell.”

There was a trail of lingering bitterness in his voice, and in a moment he added quickly:  “Do you know, I’d like to get away for a time.  I’ve changed my mind about caring to live here.  If they’d send me up to the legislature next year, I’d make a new beginning.”

The judge shook his head.

“I doubt the wisdom of it, my boy,” he said.  But Tom caught at the suggestion.

“Send you,” he repeated.  “Of course; they’ll send you from here to Jericho, if you say so.  Why, there’s no end to your popularity among men.  Where the ladies are concerned, I modestly admit that I have the advantage of you; but they can’t vote, God bless them!”

“You’re welcome to all the good they may bring you, old boy,” was Nicholas’s unchivalrous retort.

“Oh, you’re jealous, Nick!” twitted Tom gaily.  “They don’t take kindly to your carrot locks.  Now, I’ve inherited a way with them, eh, dad?”

The judge complacently buttered his buckwheats.  There was a twinkle in his eyes and a quiver at the corner of his classic mouth.

“It was the only inheritance I wasn’t able to squander in my wild oats days,” he returned.  “May you cherish it, my boy, as carefully as your father has done.  It would be a dull world without the women.”

“And a peaceable one,” added Nicholas viciously.

“We owe them much,” said the judge, pouring maple syrup from the old silver jug.  “If Helen of Troy set the world at war, she made men heroes.”

“You can’t get the pater to acknowledge that the fair things are ever wrong,” put in Tom protestingly.  “He would have proved Eve’s innocence to the Almighty.  If a woman murdered ten men before his eyes he’d lay the charge on the devil and acquit her.”

The judge shook his head with a laugh.

“I might merely argue that the queen can do no wrong,” he suggested.

When Tom had finished his breakfast, Nicholas walked with him to his office, and, seeing Bessie Pollard, red-eyed and drooping in her father’s door, he lingered an instant and held out his hand.  There was defiant sympathy in his act—­disdain of the judgment of Kingsborough—­and of General Battle, who was passing—­and pity for a bruised common thing that looked at him with beautiful, mindless eyes.

“You aren’t looking bright to-day,” he said kindly, “but things will pull through, never fear—­they always do, if you give them time.”