“I fail to understand you, Mrs.—­I will call you Mrs. Averill.  You speak of a task.  What task?”

“The only one I have heart for:  the proving that Reuther is not the child of a wilful murderer; that another man did the deed for which he suffered.  I can do it.  I feel confident that I can do it; and if you will not help me—­”

“Help you!  After what I have said and reiterated that he is guilty, guilty, guilty?”

Advancing upon her with each repetition of the word, he towered before her, an imposing, almost formidable figure.  Where was her courage now?  In what pit of despair had it finally gone down?  She eyed him fascinated, feeling her inconsequence and all the madness of her romantic, ill-digested effort, when from somewhere in the maze of confused memories there came to her a cry, not of the disappointed heart but of a daughter’s shame, and she saw again the desperate, haunted look with which the stricken child had said in answer to some plea, “A criminal’s daughter has no place in this world but with the suffering and the lost”; and nerved anew, she faced again his anger which might well be righteous, and with almost preternatural insight, boldly declared: 

“You are too vehement to quite convince me, Judge Ostrander.  Acknowledge it or not, there is more doubt than certainty in your mind; a doubt which ultimately will lead you to help me.  You are too honest not to.  When you see that I have some reason for the hopes I express, your sense of justice will prevail and you will confide to me the point untouched or the fact unmet, which has left this rankling dissatisfaction to fester in your mind.  That known, my way should broaden;—­a way, at the end of which I see a united couple—­my daughter and your son.  Oh, she is worthy of him--” the woman broke forth, as he made another repellent and imperative gesture.  “Ask any one in the town where we have lived.”

Abruptly, and without apology for his rudeness, Judge Ostrander again turned his back and walked away from her to an old-fashioned bookcase which stood in one corner of the room.  Halting mechanically before it, he let his eyes roam up and down over the shelves, seeing nothing, as she was well aware, but weighing, as she hoped, the merits of the problem she had propounded him.  She was, therefore, unduly startled when with a quick whirl about which brought him face to face with her once more, he impetuously asked: 

“Madam, you were in my house this morning.  You came in through a gate which Bela had left unlocked.  Will you explain how you came to do this?  Did you know that he was going down street, leaving the way open behind him?  Was there collusion between you?”

Her eyes looked up clearly into his.  She felt that she had nothing to disguise or conceal.

“I had urged him to do this, Judge Ostrander.  I had met him more than once in the street when he went out to do your errands, and I used all my persuasion to induce him to give me this one opportunity of pleading my cause with you.  He was your devoted servant, he showed it in his death, but he never got over his affection for Oliver.  He told me that he would wake oftentimes in the night feeling about for the boy he used to carry in his arms.  When I told him—­”