Then his tone lost its asperity as he held out his hands to a pretty
girl who was coming across the green.

"So you are back from school, Miss Juliet," he said gallantly. "I was
telling your mother only yesterday that I didn't approve of sending our
fairest products away from Kingsborough. It wasn't done in my day. Then
the prettiest girls stayed at home and gave our young fellows a chance."

The girl shook her head until the blue ribbons on her straw hat
fluttered in the wind, and blushed until her soft eyes were like
forget-me-nots set in rose leaves. She possessed a serene, luminous
beauty, which became intensified beneath the gaze of the beholder.

"I have come back for good, now," she answered in a serious sweetness of
voice; "and I am out this afternoon looking up my Sunday-school class.
The children have scattered sadly. You will let me have Tom again, won't
you?"

"Have Tom! Why, you may have him every day and Sunday too--the lucky
scamp! Ah, I only wish I were a boy again, with a soul worth saving and
such a pair of eyes in search of it."

The girl dimpled into a smile and flushed to her low, white forehead, on
which the soft hair was smoothly parted before it broke into sunny curls
about the temples. She exhaled an atmosphere of gentleness mixed with a
saintly coquetry, which produced an impression at once human and divine,
such as one receives from the sight of a rose in a Bible or a curl in
the hair of a saint. The judge looked at her warmly, sighing half
happily, half regretfully.