He looked his astonishment.  “Wireless?”

“Heart-wireless, Daddy.  Didn’t you get messages that way when you were young—­from Mother?”

“How do I know?  It’s been twenty-five years since then, and we haven’t had to send messages.  We’ve just held on to each other’s hands, thank God.”  He bent and kissed her.  “You stay and tell the Judge, Mary.  He’ll sleep for a half-hour yet:  he’s as regular as the clock.”

His own two dogs followed him, but the Judge’s beagles lay with their noses on their paws at their master’s feet.  Now and then they snapped at flies but otherwise they were motionless.

Before the half hour was up Fiddle-dee-dee fell asleep, and the Judge waking, saw on the other side of a stream propped against the gray old oak, the young mother cool in her white dress, her child in her arms.

“Father had to go,” she told him, and explained the need; “he’ll send Calvin for the basket.”

“I can carry my own basket, Mary; I’m not a thousand years old.”

“It isn’t that.  But you’ve never carried baskets, Judge.”

The Judge chuckled.  “You say that as if it were an accusation.”

“It isn’t.  Only some of us seem born to carry baskets and others are born to—­let us carry them.”  Her smile redeemed her words from impertinence.

“Are you a Bolshevik, Mary?”

“No.  I believe in the divine rights of kings and—­Judges.  I’d hate to see you carry a basket.  It would rob you of something—­just as I would hate to see a king without his crown or a queen without her scepter.”

“Oh, Mary, Mary, your father has never said things like that to me.”

“He doesn’t feel them.  Father believes in The God of Things as They are——­”

“And don’t you?”

“I believe in you,” she rose and carrying her sleeping child, crossed the stream on the stones as easily as if she carried no burden; “you know I believe in you, don’t you—­and in all the Bannisters?”

It was said so lightly that he took it lightly.  No one was so touchy as the Judge about his dignity if it were disregarded.  But here was little Mary smiling up at him and telling him that he was a king with a crown and she liked it.

“Well, well.  Let’s sit down, Mary.”

“Fish, if you want to, and I’ll watch.”

He baited his hook and cast his line into the stream.  It had a bobbing red cork which fascinated Fiddle-dee-dee.  She tried to wade out and get it, and had to be held by her very short skirts lest she drown in the attempt.

“So I’m a confounded autocrat,” the Judge chuckled.  “Nobody ever said that to me before, but maybe some of them have been thinking it.”

“Maybe they have,” said Mary gravely, “but they haven’t really cared.  Having the Bannisters at Huntersfield is like the English having a Victoria or an Edward or a George at Buckingham Palace or at Windsor; it adds flavor to their—­democracy——­”