Lawrence led the way with a jaunty step that was intended to show his easy footing with the Carters. But Marley lagged behind. Even if calling on girls had not been such a serious business with him, he could not forget that he was just graduated from college and that a certain dignity befitted him. He wished Lawrence would not speak so loud; the girls might hear, and think he was afraid; he wished to keep the truth from them as long as possible. He had already caught a glimpse of the girls, or thought he had, but before he could make sure, the vague white figures on the veranda stirred; he heard a scurrying, and the loose bang of a screen door. Then it was still. Lawrence laughed—somehow, as Marley felt, derisively.

The way from the sidewalk up to the Carters’ veranda was not long, of course, though it seemed long to Marley, and Marley’s deliberation made it seem long to Lawrence. They paused at the steps of the veranda, and Lawrence made a low bow.

“Good evening, Mrs. Carter,” he said. “Ah, Captain, you here too?”

Marley had not noticed the captain, or Mrs. Carter; they sat there so quietly, enjoying the cool of the evening, or such cool as a July evening can find in central Ohio.

“My friend, Mr. Marley, Mrs. Carter—Glenn Marley—you’ve heard of him, Captain.”

Marley bowed and said something. The presentation there in the darkness made it rather difficult for him, and neither the captain nor his wife moved. Lawrence sat down on the steps and fanned himself with his hat.

“Been a hot day, Captain,” he said. “Think there’s any sign of rain?” He sniffed the air. The captain did not need to sniff the air to be able to reply, in a voice that rumbled up from his bending figure, that he had no hope of any.

“Mayme’s home, ain’t she?” asked Lawrence, turning to Mrs. Carter.

“I’ll go see,” said Mrs. Carter, and she rose quickly, as if glad to get away, and the screen door slammed again.

“Billy was in the bank to-day,” Lawrence went on, speaking to Captain Carter. “He said your wheat was ready to cut. Did you get Foose all right?”

“Yes,” said the captain, “he’ll give me next week.”

“Do you have to board the threshers?”

“No, not this year; they bring along their own cook, and a tent and everything.”

“Je-rusalem!” exclaimed Lawrence. “Things are changing in these days, ain’t they? Harvesting ain’t as hard on the women-folks as it used to be.”

“No,” said the captain, “but I pay for it, so much extra a bushel.”

His head shook regretfully, but he would have lost his regrets in telling of the time when he had swung a cradle all day in the harvest field, had not Mrs. Carter’s voice just then been heard calling up the stairs:

“Mayme!”

“Whoo!” answered a high, feminine voice.

“Come down. There’s some one here to see you.”

Mrs. Carter turned into the parlor, and the tall windows that opened to the floor of the veranda burst into light.

“She’ll be right down, John,” said Mrs. Carter, appearing in the door. “You give me your hats and go right in.”

“All right,” said Lawrence, and he got to his feet. “Come on, Glenn.”

Mrs. Carter took the hats of the young men and hung them on the rack, where they might easily have hung them themselves. Then she went back to the veranda, letting the screen door bang behind her, and Lawrence and Marley entered the parlor. Marley took his seat on one of the haircloth chairs that seemed to have ranged themselves permanently along the walls, and Lawrence went to the square piano that stood across one corner of the room, and sat down tentatively on the stool, swinging from side to side.

Marley glanced at the pictures on the walls. One of them was a steel engraving of Lincoln and his cabinet; another, in a black oval frame, portrayed Captain Carter in uniform, his hair dusting the strapped shoulders of a coat made after the pattern that seems to have been worn so uncomfortably by the heroes of the Civil War. There was, however, a later picture of the captain, a crayon enlargement of a photograph, that had taken him in civilian garb. This picture, in its huge gilt frame, was the most aggressive thing in the room, except, possibly, the walnut what-not. Marley had a great fear of the what-not; it seemed to him that if he stirred he must topple it over, and dash its load of trinkets to the floor. Presently he heard the swish of skirts. Then a tall girl came in, and Lawrence sprang to his feet.

“Hello, Mayme. What’d you run for?” he said.

He had crossed the room and seized the girl’s hand. She flashed a rebuke at him, though it was evident that the rebuke was more out of deference to the strange presence of Marley than for any real resentment she felt.

“This is my friend, Mr. Marley, Miss Carter,” Lawrence said. “You’ve heard me speak of him.”

Marley edged away from the what-not, rose and took the hand the girl gave him. Then Miss Carter crossed to the black haircloth sofa and seated herself, smoothing out her skirts.

“Didn’t know what to do, so we thought we’d come out and see you,” said Lawrence.

“Oh, indeed!” said Miss Carter. “Well, it’s too bad about you. We’ll do when you can’t find anybody else to put up with you, eh?”

“Oh, yes, you’ll do in a pinch,” chaffed Lawrence.

“Well, can’t you find a comfortable seat?” the girl asked, still addressing Lawrence, who had gone back to the piano stool.

“I’m going to play in a minute,” said Lawrence, “and sing.”

“Well, excuse me!” implored Miss Carter. “Do let me get you a seat.”

Lawrence promptly went over to the sofa and leaned back in one corner of it, affecting a discomfort.

“Can’t I get you a pillow, Mr. Lawrence?” Miss Carter asked presently. “Or perhaps a cot; I believe there’s one somewhere in the attic.”

“Oh, I reckon I can stand it,” said Lawrence.

Marley had regained his seat on the edge of the slippery chair.

“Where’s Vinie?” asked Lawrence.

“She’s coming,” answered Miss Carter.

“Taking out her curl papers, eh?” said Lawrence. “She needn’t mind us.”

Miss Carter pretended a disgust, but as she was framing a retort, somehow, the eyes of all of them turned toward the hall door. A girl in a gown of white stood there clasping and unclasping her hands curiously, and looking from one to another of those in the room.

“Come in, Lavinia,” said Miss Carter. Something had softened her voice. The girl stepped into the room almost timidly.

“Miss Blair,” said Miss Carter, “let me introduce Mr. Marley.”

The sudden consciousness that he had been sitting—and staring—smote Marley, and he sprang to his feet. Embarrassment overpowered him and he bowed awkwardly. Lawrence had been silent, and his silence had been a long one for him. Seeming to recognize this he hastened to say:

“Well, how’s the world using you, Vinie?”

The girl smiled and answered:

“Oh, pretty well, thank you, Jack.”

It grated on Marley to hear her called Vinie. Lavinia Blair! Lavinia Blair! That was her name. He had heard it before, of course, yet it had never sounded as it did now when he repeated it to himself. The girl had seated herself in a rocking-chair across the room, almost out of range, as it were. He was rather glad of this, if anything. It seemed to relieve him of the duty of talking to her. He supposed, of course, they would pair off somehow. The young people always did in Macochee. He supposed he had been brought there to pair off with Lavinia Blair. He liked the thought, yet the position had its responsibilities. Somehow he never could forget that he could not dance. He hoped they would not propose dancing. He always had a fear of that in making calls, and all the calls he made seemed to come to it soon or late; some one always proposed it.

Marley was aware that Lawrence and Mayme Carter had resumed the exchange of their rude repartee, though he did not know what they had said. They kept laughing, too. Lavinia Blair seemed to join in the laughter if not in the badinage. Marley wished he might join in it. Jack Lawrence was evidently funnier than ever that night; Mayme Carter was convulsed. Now and then Lawrence said something to her in a tone too low for the others to hear, and these remarks pushed her to the verge of hysterics. Marley had a notion they were laughing at him.

Meanwhile Lavinia Blair sat with her hands in her lap, smiling as though she were amused. Marley wondered if he amused her. He felt that he ought to say something, but he did not know what to say. He thought of several things, but, as he turned them over in his mind, he was convinced that they were not appropriate. So he sat and looked at Lavinia Blair, looked at her eyes, her mouth, her hair. He thought he had never seen such a complexion.

Mayme Carter had snatched her handkerchief back from Lawrence, and retreated to her end of the sofa. There she sat up stiffly, folded her hands, and, though her mirth still shook her spasmodically, she said:

“Now, Jack, behave yourself.”

Lawrence burlesqued a surprise, and said:

“I’ll leave it to Vine if I’ve done anything.”

Marley wondered how much further abbreviation Lavinia Blair’s name would stand, but he was suddenly aware that he was being addressed. Miss Carter, with an air of dismissing Lawrence, said:

“You have not been in Macochee long, have you, Mr. Marley?”

Marley admitted that he had not, but said that he liked the town. When Lawrence explained that Marley was going to settle down there and become one of them, Miss Carter said she was awfully glad, but warned him against associating too much with Lawrence. This embarrassed Marley, if it did not Lawrence, and he immediately gave the scene to Lawrence, who guessed he would sing his song. To do so he went to the piano, and began to pick over the frayed sheets of music that lay on its green cover. To forestall him, however, Miss Carter rushed across the room and slid on to the piano stool herself, saying breathlessly:

“Anything to stop that!”

She struck a few vagrant chords, and Marley, glad of a subject on which he could express himself, pleaded with her to play. At last she did so. When she had finished, Lawrence clapped his hands loudly, and stopped only when a voice startled them. It was Mrs. Carter calling through the window:

“Play your new piece, Mayme!”

Miss Carter demurred, but after they had argued the question through the window, the daughter gave in, and played it. The music soothed Lawrence to silence, and when Miss Carter completed her little repertoire, his mockery could recover itself no further than to say:

“Won’t you favor us, Miss Blair?”

When Lavinia Blair declined, he struck an imploring attitude and said:

“Oh, please do! We’re dying to hear you. You didn’t leave your music at home, did you?”

Marley heard the chairs scraping on the veranda, and the screen door slammed once more. Then he heard Captain Carter go up the stairs, while Mrs. Carter halted in the doorway of the parlor long enough to say:

“You lock the front door when you come up, Mayme.”

Mayme without turning replied “All right,” and when her mother had disappeared she said:

“It’s awful hot in here, let’s go outside.”

Marley found himself strolling in the yard with Lavinia Blair. The moon had not risen, but the girl’s throat and arms gleamed in the starlight; her white dress seemed to be a cloud of gauze; she floated, rather than walked, there by his side. They paused by the gate. About them were the voices of the summer night, the crickets, the katydids, far away the frogs, chirping musically. They stood a while in the silence, and then they turned, and were talking again.

Marley did most of the talking, and all he said was about himself, though he did not realize that this was so. He had already told her of his life in the towns where his father had preached before he came to Macochee, and of his four years in college at Delaware. He tried to give her some notion of the sense of alienation he had felt as the son of an itinerant Methodist minister; for him no place had ever taken on the warm color and expression of home. He explained that as yet he knew little of Macochee, having been away at college when his father moved there the preceding fall. It was so easy to talk to her, and as he told her of his ambitions, the things he was going to do became so many, and so easy. He was going to become a lawyer; he thought he should go to Cincinnati.

“And leave Macochee?” said Lavinia Blair.

Marley caught his breath.

“Would you care?” he whispered.

She did not answer. He heard the crickets, the katydids, the frogs again; there came the perfume of the lilacs, late flowering that year; the heavy odor of a shrub almost overpowered him.

“My father is a lawyer,” Lavinia said.

They had turned off the path, and were wandering over the lawn. The dew sparkled on it; and Marley became solicitous.

“Won’t you get your feet wet?” he asked.

The girl laughed at the idea, but she caught up her skirts, and they wandered on in the shade of the tall elms. Marley did not know where they were. The yard seemed an endless garden, immense, unknown, enchanted; the dark trees all around him stood like the forest of some park, and the lawn stretched away to fall over endless terraces; he imagined statues and fountains gleaming in the heavy shadows of the trees. The house seemed lost in the distance, though he felt its presence there behind him.

Once he saw the twinkle of a passing light in an upper story. He could no longer hear the voices of Mayme and Lawrence, but he caught the tinkling notes of a banjo, away off somewhere. Its music was very sweet. They strolled on, their feet swishing in the damp grass, then suddenly there was a rush, a loud barking, and a dog sprang at them out of the darkness. Lavinia gave a little cry. Marley was startled; he felt that he must run, yet he thought of the girl beside him. He must not let her see his fear. He stepped in front of her. He could feel her draw more closely to him, and he thrilled as the sense of his protectorship came to him. He must think of some heroic scheme of vanquishing the dog, but it stopped in its mad rush, and Lavinia, standing aside, said:

“Why, it’s only Sport!”

They laughed, and their laugh was the happier because of the relief from their fear.

“We must have wandered around behind the house,” said Lavinia. “There’s the shed.”

They turned, and went back. The enchantment of the yard had departed. Marley seemed to see things clearly once more, though his heart still beat as he felt the delicious sense of protectorship that had come over him as Lavinia shrank to his side at the moment the dog rushed at them. Nor could he ever forget her face as she smiled up at him in the little opening they came into on the side lawn. The young moon was just sailing over the trees. As they approached the veranda, Lawrence’s voice called out of the darkness:

“Well, where have you young folks been stealing away to?”

CHAPTER II
WADE POWELL

Marley halted at the threshold and glanced up at the sign that swung over the doorway. The gilt lettering of the sign had long ago been tarnished, and where its black sanded paint had peeled in many weathers the original tin was as rusty as the iron arm from which it creaked. Yet Macochee had long since lost its need of the shingle to tell it where Wade Powell’s law office was. It had been for many years in one of the little rooms of the low brick building in Miami Street, just across from the Court House; it was almost as much of an institution as the Court House itself, with which its triumphs and its trials were identified. Marley gathered enough courage from his inspection of the sign to enter, but once inside, he hesitated. Then a heavy voice spoke.

“Well, come in,” it said peremptorily.

Wade Powell, sitting with his feet on his table, held his newspaper aside and looked at Marley over his spectacles. Marley had had an ideal of Wade Powell, and now he had to pause long enough to relinquish the ideal and adjust himself to the reality. The hair was as disordered as his young fancy would have had it, but it was thinner than he had known it in his dreams, and its black was streaked with gray. The face was smooth-shaven, which accorded with his notion, though it had not been shaven as recently as he felt it should have been. But he could not reconcile himself to the spectacles that rested on Powell’s nose, and pressed their bows into the flesh of his temples—the eagle eyes of the Wade Powell of his imagination had never known glasses.

When Wade Powell slowly pulled his spectacles from his nose and tossed them on to the table before him, he bent his eyes on Marley, and their gaze, under their heavy brows, somewhat restored him, but it could not atone for the disappointment. Perhaps the disappointment that Marley felt in this moment came from some dim, unrealized sense that Wade Powell was growing old. The spectacles, the gray in his hair, the wrinkles in his face, the looseness of the skin at his jaws and at his throat—where a fold of it hung between the points of his collar—all told that Wade Powell had passed the invisible line which marks life’s summit, and that his face was turned now toward the evening. There was the touch of sadness in the indistinct conception of him as a man who had not altogether realized the ambitions of his youth or the predictions of his friends, and the sadness came from the intuition that the failure or the half-failure was not of the heroic kind.

The office in which he sat, and on which, in the long years, he had impressed his character, was untidy; the floor was dirty, the books on the shelves were dusty and leaning all awry; the set of the Ohio reports had not been kept up to date; one might have told by a study of them at just what period enterprise and energy had faltered, while the gaps here and there showed how an uncalculating generosity had helped a natural indolence by lending indiscriminately to other lawyers, who, with the lack of respect for the moral of the laws they pretended to revere, had borrowed with no thought of returning.

Two or three pictures hung crookedly on the walls; the table at which Powell sat was old and scarred; its ink-stand had long ago gone dry and been abandoned; a cheap bottle, with its cork rolling tipsily by its side, had taken the ink-stand’s place. The papers scattered over the table had an air of hopelessness, as though they had grown tired, like the clients they represented, in waiting for Powell’s attention. The half-open door at the back led into a room that had been, and possibly might yet be, used as a private office or consulting room, should any one care to brave its darkness and its dust; but as for Wade Powell, it was plain that he preferred to sit democratically in the outer office, where all might see him, and, what was of more importance to him, where he might see all.

The one new thing in the room was a typewriter, standing on its little sewing-machine table, in the corner of the room. There was no stenographer nor any chair for one; Marley imagined Powell, whenever he had occasion to write, sitting down to the machine himself, and picking out his pleadings painfully, laboriously and slowly, letter by letter, using only his index fingers. And this somehow humbled his ideal the more. Marley almost wished he hadn’t come.

“What’s on your mind, young man?” said Wade Powell, leaning back in his chair and dropping his long arm at his side until his newspaper swept the floor. Marley had seated himself in a wooden chair that was evidently intended for clients, and he began nervously.

“Well, I—”

Here he stopped, overcome again by an embarrassment. A smile spread over Wade Powell’s face, a gentle smile with a winning quality in it, and his face to Marley became young again.

“Tell your troubles,” he said. “I’ve confessed all the young men in Macochee for twenty-five years. Yes—thirty-five—” He grew suddenly sober as he numbered the years and then exclaimed as if to himself:

“My God! Has it been that long?”

He took out his watch and looked at it as if it must somehow correct his reckoning. For a moment, then, he thought; his gaze was far away. But Marley brought him back when he said:

“I only want—I only want to study law.”

“Oh!” said Powell, and he seemed somehow relieved. “Is that all?”

To Marley this seemed quite enough, and the disappointment he felt, which was a part of the effect Wade Powell’s office had had on him, showed suddenly in his face. Powell glanced quickly at him, and hastened to reassure him.

“We can fix that easily enough,” he said. “Have you ever read any law?”

“No,” said Marley.

“Been to college?”

Marley told him that he had just that summer been graduated and when he mentioned the name of the college Powell said:

“The Methodists, eh?”

He could hardly conceal a certain contempt in the tone with which he said this, and then, as if instantly regretting the unkindness, he observed:

“It’s a good school, I’m told.”

He could not, however, evince an entire approval, and so seeming to desert the subject he hastened on:

“What’s your name?”

“Glenn Marley.”

“Oh!” Wade Powell dropped his feet to the floor and sat upright. “Are you Preacher Marley’s son?”

Marley did not like to hear his father called “Preacher,” and when he said that he was the son of Doctor Marley, Powell remarked:

“I’ve heard him preach, and he’s a damn good preacher too, I want to tell you.”

Marley warmed under this profane indorsement. He had always, from a boy, felt somehow that he must defend his father’s position as a preacher from the world, as with the little world of his boyhood and youth he had always had to defend his own position as the son of a preacher.

“Yes, sir, he’s a good preacher, and a good man,” Powell went on. He had taken a cigar from his pocket and was nipping the end from it with his teeth. He lighted it, and leaned back comfortably again to smoke, and then in tardy hospitality he drew another cigar from his waistcoat pocket and held it toward Marley.

“Smoke?” he said, and then he added apologetically, “I didn’t think; I never do.”

Marley declined the cigar, but Powell pressed it on him, saying:

“Well, your father does, I’ll bet. Give it to him with Wade Powell’s compliments. He won’t hesitate to smoke with a publican and sinner.”

Marley smiled and put the cigar away in his pocket.

“I don’t know, though,” Powell went on slowly, speaking as much to himself as to Marley, while he watched the thick white clouds he rolled from his lips, “that he’d want you to be in my office. I know some of the brethren wouldn’t approve. They’d think I’d contaminate you.”

Marley would have hastened to reassure Powell had he known how to do so without seeming to recognize the possibility of contamination; but while he hesitated Powell avoided the necessity for him by asking:

“Did your father send you to me?”

He looked at Marley eagerly, and with an expression of unfounded hope, as he awaited the answer.

“No,” replied Marley, “he doesn’t know. I haven’t talked with him at all. I have to do something and I’ve always thought I’d go into the law. I presume it would be better to go to a law school, but father couldn’t afford that after putting me through college. I thought I could read law in some office, and maybe get admitted that way.”

“Sure,” said Powell, “it’s easy enough. You’ll have to learn the law after you get to practising anyway—and there isn’t much to learn at that. It’s mostly a fake.”

Marley looked at him in some alarm, at this new smiting of an idol.

“I began to read law,” Powell went on, “under old Judge Colwin—that is, what I read. I used to sit at the window with a book in my lap and watch the girls go by. Still,” he added with a tone of doing himself some final justice, “it was a liberal education to sit under the old judge’s drippings. I learned more that way than I ever did at the law school.”

He smoked on a moment, ruminating on his lost youth; then, bringing himself around to business again, he said:

“How’d you happen to come to me?”

“Well,” said Marley, haltingly, “I’d heard a good deal of you—and I thought I’d like you, and then I’ve heard father speak of you.”

“You have?” said Powell, looking up quickly.

“Yes.”

“What’d he say?”

“Well, he said you were a great orator and he said you were always with the under dog. He said he liked that.”

Powell turned his eyes away and his face reddened.

“Well, let’s see. If you think your father would approve of your sitting at the feet of such a Gamaliel as I, we can—” He was squinting painfully at his book-shelves. “Is that Blackstone over there on the top shelf?”

Marley got up and glanced along the backs of the dingy books, their calfskin bindings deeply browned by the years, their red and black labels peeling off.

“Here’s Blackstone,” he said, taking down a book, “but it’s the second volume.”

“Second volume, eh? Don’t see the first around anywhere, do you?”

Marley looked, without finding it.

“Then see if Walker’s there.”

Marley looked again.

“Walker’s American Law,” Powell explained.

“I don’t see it,” Marley said.

“No, I reckon not,” assented Powell, “some one’s borrowed it. I seem to run a sort of circulating library of legal works in this town, without fines—though we have statutes against petit larceny. Well, hand me Swan’s Treatise. That’s it, on the end of the second shelf.”

Marley took down the book, and gave it to Powell. While Marley dusted his begrimed fingers with his handkerchief, Powell blew the dust off the top of the book; he slapped it on the arm of his chair, the dust flying from it at every stroke. He picked up his spectacles, put them on and turned over the first few leaves of the book.

“You might begin on that,” he said presently, “until we can borrow a Blackstone or a Walker for you. This book is the best law-book ever written anyway; the law’s all there. If you knew all that contains, you could go in any court and get along without giving yourself away; which is the whole duty of a lawyer.”

He closed the book and gave it to Marley, who was somewhat at a loss; this was the final disappointment. He had thought that his introduction into the mysteries of the noble profession should be attended by some sort of ceremony. He looked at the book in his hand quite helplessly and then looked up at Powell.

“Is that—all?” he said.

“Why, yes,” Powell answered. “Isn’t that enough?”

“I thought—that is, that I might have some duties. How am I to begin?”

“Why, just open the book to the first page and read that, then turn over to the second page and read that, and so on—till you get to the end.”

“What will my hours be?”

“Your hours?” said Powell, as if he did not understand. “Oh, just suit yourself.”

Marley was looking at the book again.

“Don’t you make any entry—any memorandum?” he asked, still unable to separate himself from the idea that something formal, something legal, should mark the beginning of such an important epoch.

“Oh, you keep track of the date,” said Powell, “and at the end of three years I’ll give you a certificate. You may find that you can do most of your reading at home, but come around.”

Marley looked about the office, trying to imagine himself in this new situation.

“I’d like, you know,” he said, “to do something, if I could, to repay you for your trouble.”

“That’s all right, my boy,” said Powell. Then he added as if the thought had just come to him:

“Say, can you run a typewriter?”

“I can learn.”

“Well, that’s more than I can do,” said Powell, glancing at his new machine. “I’ve tried, but it would take a stationary engineer to operate that thing. You might help out with my letters and my pleadings now and then. And I’d like to have you around. You’d make good company.”

“Well,” said Marley, “I’ll be here in the morning.” He still clung to the idea that he was to be a part of the office, to be an identity in the local machinery of the law. As he rose to go, a young man appeared in the doorway. He was tall, and the English cap and the rough Scotch suit he wore, with the trousers rolled up over his heavy tan shoes, enabled Marley to identify him instantly as young Halliday. He was certain of this when Powell, looking up, said indifferently:

“Hello, George. Raining in London?”

“Oh, I say, Powell,” replied Halliday, ignoring a taunt that had grown familiar to him, “that Zeller case—we would like to have that go over to the fall term, if you don’t mind.”

“Why don’t you settle it?” asked Powell.

Halliday was leaning against the door-post, and had drawn a short brier pipe from his pocket. Before he answered, he paused long enough to fill it with tobacco. Then he said:

“You’ll have to see the governor about that—it’s a case he’s been looking after.”

“Oh, well,” said Powell, with his easy acquiescence, “all right.”

Halliday had pressed the tobacco into the bowl of the pipe and struck a match.

“Then, I’ll tell old Bill,” he said, pausing in his sentence to light his pipe, “to mark it off the assignment.”

Marley watched Halliday saunter away, with a feeling that mixed admiration with amazement. He could not help admiring his clothes, and he felt drawn toward him as a college man from a school so much greater than his own, though he felt some resentment because Halliday had never once given a sign that he was aware of Marley’s presence. His amazement came from the utter disrespect with which Halliday referred to Judge Blair. Old Bill! Marley had caught his breath. He would have liked to discuss Halliday with Powell, but the lawyer seemed to be as indifferent to Halliday’s existence as Halliday had been to Marley’s, and when Marley saw that Powell was not likely to refer to him, he started toward the door. As he went Powell resumptively called after him:

“I’ll get a Blackstone for you in a day or two. Be down in the morning.”

Marley went away bearing Swan’s Treatise under his arm. He looked up at the Court House across the way; the trees were stirring in the light winds of summer, and their leaves writhed joyously in the sun. The windows of the Court House were open, and he could hear the voice of some lawyer arguing a cause to the jury. Marley thought of Judge Blair sitting there, the jury in its box, the sleepy bailiff drowsing in his place, the accustomed attorneys and the angry litigants, and his heart began to beat a little more rapidly, for the thought of Judge Blair brought the thought of Lavinia Blair. And in the days to come, when he should be arguing a cause to a jury, as that lawyer, whose voice came pealing and echoing in sudden and surprising shouts through the open windows, was arguing a cause now, would Lavinia Blair be interested?