organizer when the old Macdonald Government went out,--if he could
have known that even on that last day Neil was drunk when he rode
with the Missinaba Horse to the station to join the Third Contingent
for the war, and all the street of the little town was one great roar
of people--

But the judge never knew, and now he never will. For if you could
find it in the meanness of your soul to tell him, it would serve no
purpose now except to break his heart, and there would rise up to
rebuke you the pictured vision of an untended grave somewhere in the
great silences of South Africa.

Did I say above, or seem to imply, that the judge sometimes spoke
harshly to his wife? Or did you gather for a minute that her lot was
one to lament over or feel sorry for? If so, it just shows that you
know nothing about such things, and that marriage, at least as it
exists in Mariposa, is a sealed book to you. You are as ignorant as
Miss Spiffkins, the biology teacher at the high school, who always
says how sorry she is for Mrs. Pepperleigh. You get that impression
simply because the judge howled like an Algonquin Indian when he saw
the sprinkler running on the lawn. But are you sure you know the
other side of it? Are you quite sure when you talk like Miss
Spiffkins does about the rights of it, that you are taking all things
into account? You might have thought differently perhaps of the
Pepperleighs, anyway, if you had been there that evening when the
judge came home to his wife with one hand pressed to his temple and
in the other the cablegram that said that Neil had been killed in
action in South Africa. That night they sat together with her hand in
his, just as they had sat together thirty years ago when he was a law
student in the city.