“If they had not thought!” he repeated.  “If you had said if they had not known, then I might indeed have smelt danger.  People think strange things.  Perhaps you think them, too.”

“I?” The moment was critical.  She saw now that he was sounding her,—­had been sounding her from the first.  Should she let everything go and let him know her mind, or should she continue to conceal it?  In either course lay danger, if not to herself and Reuther, then to himself and Oliver.  She decided for the truth.  Subterfuge had had its day.  The menace of the future called for the strongest weapons which lie at the hand of man.  She, therefore, answered: 

“Yes; I have been thinking, and this is the result:  You must either explain publicly and quite satisfactorily to the people of this town, the mystery of your long separation from Oliver and the life you have since led in this trebly barred house, or accept the opprobrium of such accusations as we have listened to to-day.  There is no middle course, Judge Ostrander.  I who have loved Oliver almost like a son;—­who have a daughter who not only loves him but regards him as a perfect model of noble manhood, tell you so, though it breaks my heart to do it.  I cannot see you both fall headlong to destruction for lack of understanding the nearness or the depth of the precipice you are approaching.”

“So!”

The ejaculation came after a moment of intense silence—­a silence during which she seemed to discern the sturdiness of years drop slowly away from him.

“So that is the explanation which people give to my desire for retirement and a life of contemplation.  Well,” he slowly added, with the halting utterance of one to whom each word is an effort, “I can see some justification for their conclusions now.  I have been too self-centred, and too short-sighted to recognise my own folly.  I might have known that anything out of the common course rouses a curiosity which supplies its own explanation at any cost to propriety or respect.  I have courted my own doom.  I am the victim of my own mistake.  But,” he continued, with a flash of his old fire which made him a dignified figure again, “I’m not going to cringe because I have lost ground in the first skirmish.  I come of fighting blood.  Oliver’s reputation shall not suffer long, whatever I may have done in my parental confidence to endanger it.  I have not spent ten years at the bar, and fifteen on the bench for nothing.  Let the people look to it!  I will stand by my own.”

He had as completely forgotten her as if she had never existed.  John Scoville, his widow, even the child bowed under troubles not unlike his own, had faded alike from his consciousness.  But the generous Deborah felt no resentment at the determination which would only press her and hers deeper into contumely.  She had seen the father in the man for the first time, and her whole heart went out in passionate sympathy