and Time, which reconciles most men to their losses, had failed to
reconcile him to his. Grief slowly settled into confirmed
melancholy, and melancholy into the eccentricities of which I have
spoken and upon which I must now enlarge a trifle further, in
order that the curiosity and subsequent action of the small group
of people in whom we are interested may be fully understood and,
possibly, in some degree pardoned.

Judge Ostrander was, as I have certainly made you see, a recluse
of the most uncompromising type; but he was such for only half his
time. From ten in the morning till five in the afternoon, he came
and went like any other citizen, fulfilling his judicial duties
with the same scrupulous care as formerly and with more
affability. Indeed, he showed at times, and often when it was
least expected, a mellowness of temper quite foreign to him in his
early days. The admiration awakened by his fine appearance on the
bench was never marred now by those quick and rasping tones of an
easily disturbed temper which had given edge to his invective when
he stood as pleader in the very court where he now presided as
judge. But away from the bench, once quit of the courthouse and
the town, the man who attempted to accost him on his way to his
carriage or sought to waylay him at his own gate, had need of all
his courage to sustain the rebuff his presumption incurred.

One more detail and I will proceed with my story.

The son, a man of great ability who was making his way as a
journalist in another city, had no explanation to give of his
father's peculiarities. Though he never came to Shelby--the
rupture between the two, if rupture it were, seeming to be