“I am glad,” she replied, thinking with what humour this would have struck her once.  “I—­I ask because, having nothing on my mind but housekeeping, I desire to remedy anything which is not in accordance with your exact wishes.”

His attention was caught and by the very phrase she desired.

“Nothing on your mind but housekeeping?” he repeated.  “I thought you had something else of a very particular nature with which to occupy yourself.”

“I had; but I have been advised against pursuing it.  The folly was too great.”

“Who advised you?”

The words came short and sharp just as they must have come in those old days when he confronted his antagonists at the bar.

“Mr. Black.  He was my husband’s counsel, you remember.  He says that I should only have my trouble for my pains, and I have come to agree with him.  Reuther must content herself with the happiness of living under this roof; and I, with the hope of contributing to your comfort.”

Had she impressed him?  Had she played her part with success?  Dare she lift her eye and meet the gaze she felt concentrated upon her?  No.  He must speak first.  She must have some clew to the effect she had produced before she risked his penetration by a direct look.

She had to wait longer than her beating heart desired.  He had his own agitation to master, and possibly his own doubts.  This was not the fiery, determined woman he had encountered amid the ruins of Spencer’s Folly.  What had made the change?  Black’s discouraging advice?  Hardly.  Why should she take from that hard-faced lawyer what she had not been willing to take from himself?  There must have been some other influencing cause.

His look, his attitude, his voice, betrayed his hesitations, as he finally remarked: 

“Black is a man of excellent counsel, but he is hard as a stone and not of the sort whose monitions I should expect to have weight with one like you.  What did he put in the balance,—­or what have others put in the balance, to send your passionate intentions flying up to the beam?  I should be glad to hear.”

Should she tell him?  She had a momentary impulse that way.  Then the irrevocableness of such a move frightened her; and, pale with dismay at what she felt to be a narrow escape from a grave error of judgment, she answered with just enough truth, for her to hope that the modicum of falsehood accompanying it would escape his attention: 

“What has changed my intentions?  My experience here, Judge Ostrander.  With every day I pass under this roof, I realise more and more the mistake I made in supposing that any change in circumstances would make a union between our two children proper or feasible.  Headstrong as I am by nature, I have still some sense of the fitness of things, and it is that sense awakened by a better knowledge of what the Ostrander name stands for, which has outweighed my hopes and mad intentions.  I am sorry that I ever troubled you with them.”