I had not ought to write you this and your Uncles would pretty nigh kill me if they knew I done so but I am going to just the same.  Busines has gone to rack and ruin.  Hamilton & Co. thanks to those and other darned stores, ain’t making enough to keep boddy and soul together and they are making themselves sick over it.  I don’t know what will become of them to if something or someboddy does not think up some way to help them over the shoals.  They do not tell anyone and least of all they wouldent want you to be told, but I think you ought to be.  They have done a whole lot for you.  Can’t you think up some way to do something for them.  For god Sakes write right off.

Yours truly,

Isaiah chase.

CHAPTER XVII

People grow older, even on the Cape, where hurry—­except by the automobiles of summer residents—­is not considered good form and where Father Time is supposed to sit down to rest.  Judge Baxter, Ostable’s leading attorney-at-law, had lived quietly and comfortably during the years which had passed since, as Marcellus Hall’s lawyer, he read the astonishing letter to the partners of Hamilton and Company.  He was over seventy now, and behind his back Ostable folks referred to him as “old Judge Baxter”; but although his spectacles were stronger than at that time, his mental faculties were not perceptibly weaker, and he walked with as firm, if not so rapid, a stride.  So when, at eleven in the forenoon of the day following Mary’s dinner at the Howes’ home, the Judge heard someone enter the outer room of his offices near the Ostable courthouse, he rose from his chair in the inner room and, without waiting for his clerk to announce the visitor, opened the door himself.

The caller whose question the clerk was about to answer, or would probably have answered as soon as he finished staring in awestruck admiration, was a young lady.  The Judge looked at her over his spectacles and then through them and decided that she was a stranger.  He stepped forward.

“I am Judge Baxter,” he said.  “Did you wish to see me?”

She turned toward him.  “Yes,” she said simply.  “I should like to talk with you for a few moments if you are not too busy.”

The Judge hesitated momentarily.  Only the week before a persistent and fluent young female had talked him into the purchase of a set of “Lives of the Great Jurists,” the same to be paid for in thirty-five installments of two dollars each.  Mrs. Baxter had pronounced the “Great Jurists” great humbugs, and her husband, although he pretended to find the “Lives” very interesting, was secretly inclined to agree with her.  So he hesitated.  The young woman, evidently noticing his hesitation, added: 

“If you are engaged just now I shall wait.  I came to see you on a matter of business, legal business.”

Judge Baxter tried to look as if no thought of his visitor’s having another purpose had entered his mind.