Judge Whaley now grew old rapidly, and meek and careless of his attire.  In an old pair of slippers, glove-less and abstracted, he crossed the court-house green, no longer the first gentleman in the county in courteous accost and lofty tone.  He read his Bible in the seclusion of his own house, and fishermen on the river coming in after midnight saw the lamp-light stream through the chinks of his shutters, and said:  “He has never been the same since Perry went away.”  But he read in the religious papers of the genius and power of the absent one, roving like a young hermit loosened, and with a tongue of flame over the length and breadth of the country, producing extraordinary excitement and adding thousands to his humble denomination.

On Christmas Day the Judge was sitting in his great room reading the same mystic book, and listening, with a wistfulness that had never left him, to every infrequent footfall in the street.  There came a knock at the door.  He opened it, and out of the darkness into which he could not see came a voice altered in pitch, but with remembered accents in it, saying: 

“Father, mother has come home!”

Stepping back before that extraordinary salutation, Judge Whaley saw a man come forward leading a woman by the hand.  The Judge receded until he could go no farther, and sank into his chair.  The woman knelt at his feet; older, and grown gray and in the robes of humility, yet in countenance as she had been, only purified, as it seemed, by suffering and repentance, he saw his wife of more than twenty years before.

Looking up into the face of the son he had watched so long for, the old man saw a still more wonderful transformation.  The elegant young gentleman of a few months before was a living spectre, his bright eyes standing out large and consumptive upon a transparent skin, and glittering with fanaticism or excitement.

“Perry Whaley,” said the woman firmly, but with sweetness, “it is twenty-two years since I left this house with hate of me in your heart and a degraded name; I was in thought and act a pure woman, though the evidence against me was mountain-high.  My sin was that of many women—­flirtation.  Nothing more, before my God!  I trifled with one of your students, a reckless and hot-blooded man, and inspired him with a tyrannous passion.  He swore if I would not fly with him to destroy me.  One day, the most dreadful of my life, he heard your foot upon the stairs ascending to my chamber, and threw himself into it before you and avowed himself your injurer.  Then rose in confirmation of him every girlish folly; I saw myself in your mild eyes condemned, in this community long suspected, and by my own family discarded for your sake.  Where could I go but to the author of my sorrows?  He became my husband and I am a widow.”

Judge Whaley stretched out his hand in the direction of his eyes, not upon the old wife at his feet, but toward his son, who had settled into a chair and closed his eyes as if in tired rapture.