the governor’s chair for the starting, and nearly all of the men folks have held one or all of these honours for generations.  The present judge has held them all.  I don’t know him personally, although my people and his have been thick from away back.  Sands Landing on the James is some fifty miles above our home.  The judge, Beulah Sands’s father, is close on to seventy, and I have heard mother and father say is a stalwart, a Virginia stalwart.  Being rich—­that is, what we Virginians call rich, a million or so—­he has been very active in affairs, and I knew before his daughter told me, that he was the trustee for about all the best estates in our part of the country.  It seems from what she tells, that of late he has been very active in developing our coal-mines and railroads, and that particularly he took a prominent hand in the Seaboard Air Line.  You know the road, for your father was a director, and I think the house has been prominent in its banking affairs.  Now, Jim, this poor girl, who, it seems, has recently been acting as the judge’s secretary, has just learned that that coup of Reinhart and his crowd has completely ruined her father.  The decline has swamped his own fortune, and, what is worse, a million to a million and a half of his trust funds as well, and the old judge—­well, you and I can understand his position.  Yet I do not know that you just can, either, for you do not quite understand our Virginia life and the kind of revered position a man like Judge Sands occupies.  You would have to know that to understand fully his present purgatory and the terrible position of this daughter, for it seems that since he began to get into deep water he has been relying upon her for courage and ideas.  From our talk I gather she has a wonderful store of up-to-date business notions, and I am convinced from what she lays out that the judge’s affairs are hopeless, and, Jim, when that old man goes down it will be a smash that will shake our State in more ways than one.

“Up to now the girl has stood up to the blow like a man and has been able to steady the judge until he presents an exterior that holds down suspicion as to his real financial condition, although she says Reinhart and his Baltimore lawyer, from the ruthless way they put on the screws to shake out his holdings in the Air Line, must have a line on it that the judge is overboard.  The old gentleman can keep things going for six months longer without jeopardising any of the remaining trust funds, of which he has some two millions, and while his wife, who is an invalid, knows the judge is in some trouble, she does not suspect his real position.  His daughter says that when the blow came, that day of the panic, when Reinhart jammed the stock out of sight and scuttled her father’s bankers and partners in the road, the Wilsons of Baltimore, she had a frightful struggle to keep her father from going insane.  She told me that for three days and nights she kept him locked in their rooms at their hotel in Baltimore, to prevent him from hunting Reinhart and his lawyer Rettybone and killing them both, but that at last she got him calmed down and together they have been planning.