“How do you do, Judge?” she said, for she recognized Mr. Graves as one of her few friends in Brampton.  “I have sent to Boston for the new reader, but it has not come.”

The judge took her hand and pressed it and led her into the little sitting room.  His face was very stern, but his eyes, which had flung fire at Mr. Dodd, looked at her with a vast compassion.  Her heart misgave her.

“My dear,” he said,—­it was long since the judge had called any woman “my dear,”—­“I have bad news for you.  The committee have decided that you cannot teach any longer in the Brampton school.”

“Oh, Judge,” she answered, trying to force back the tears which would come, “I have tried so hard.  I had begun to believe that I could fill the place.”

“Fill the place!” cried the judge, startling her with his sudden anger.  “No woman in the state can fill it better than you.”

“Then why am I dismissed?” she asked breathlessly.

The judge looked at her in silence, his blue lips quivering.  Sometimes even he found it hard to tell the truth.  And yet he had come to tell it, that she might suffer less.  He remembered the time when Isaac D. Worthington had done him a great wrong.

“You are dismissed,” he said, “because Mr. Worthington has come home, and because the two other members of the committee are dogs and cowards.”  Mr. Graves never minced matters when he began, and his voice shook with passion.  “If Mr. Errol had examined you, and you had your certificate, it might have been different.  Errol is not a sycophant.  Worthington does not hold his mortgage.”

“Mortgage!” exclaimed Cynthia.  The word always struck terror to her soul.

“Mr. Worthington holds Mr. Hill’s mortgage,” said Mr. Graves, more than ever beside himself at the sight of her suffering.  “That man’s tyranny is not to be borne.  We will not give up, Cynthia.  I will fight him in this matter if it takes my last ounce of strength, so help me God!”

Mortgage!  Cynthia sank down in the chair by the desk.  In spite of the misery the news had brought, the thought that his father, too, who was fighting Jethro Bass as a righteous man, dealt in mortgages and coerced men to do his will, was overwhelming.  So she sat for a while staring at the landscape on the old wall paper.

“I will go to Coniston to-night,” she said at last.

“No,” cried the judge, seizing her shoulder in his excitement, “no.  Do you think that I have been your friend—­that I am your friend?”

“Oh, Judge Graves—­”

“Then stay here, where you are.  I ask it as a favor to me.  You need not go to the school to-morrow—­indeed, you cannot.  But stay here for a day or two at least, and if there is any justice left in a free country, we shall have it.  Will you stay, as a favor to me?”

“I will stay, since you ask it,” said Cynthia.  “I will do what you think right.”

Her voice was firmer than he expected—­much firmer.  He glanced at her quickly, with something very like admiration in his eye.