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The Wishing Moon

by Louise Dutton Fillmore · English · Gutenberg #31057 · 407,586 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Wishing Moon

Author: Louise Dutton Fillmore

Illustrator: Everett Shinn


        
Release date: January 23, 2010 [eBook #31057]

Language: English

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THE WISHING MOON

by

LOUISE DUTTON

Author of "The Goddess Girl"


[Illustration: "'_Oh, Judith, won't you speak to me?_'"]

[Illustration: Publisher's logo]

Illustrated by Everett Shinn







Garden City   New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1916

Copyright, 1916, by
Louise Dutton

All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian

Copyright, 1916, The Metropolitan Magazine Company




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  "'Oh, Judith, won't you speak to me?'"    _Frontispiece_
    (See page 239)

                                               FACING PAGE

  "'I know what this means,' she asserted"             128

  "'Shut your eyes'"                                   166

  "'Judith, you don't hate me? Say it--say it'"        180




THE WISHING MOON




The Wishing Moon

CHAPTER ONE


A little girl sat on the worn front doorsteps of the Randall house. She
sat very still and straight, with her short, white skirts fluffed
daintily out on both sides, her hands tightly clasped over her thin
knees, and her long, silk-stockinged legs cuddled tight together. She
was bare-headed, and her short, soft hair showed silvery blonde in the
fading light. Her hair was bobbed. For one miserable month it had been
the only bobbed head in Green River. Her big, gray-green eyes had a
fugitive, dancing light in them. The little girl had beautiful eyes.

The little girl was Miss Judith Devereux Randall. She was eleven years
old, and she felt happier to-night than she remembered feeling in all
the eleven years of her life.

The Randalls' lawn was hedged with a fringe of lilac and syringa bushes,
with one great, spreading horse-chestnut tree at the corner. The house
did not stand far back from the street. The little girl could see a
generous section of Main Street sloping past, dark already under
shadowing trees. The street was empty. It was half-past six, and
supper-time in Green River, but the Randalls did not have supper, they
dined at night, like the Everards. To-night mother and father were
dining with the Everards, and the little girl had plans of her own.

Father was dressed, and waiting, shut in the library. Mother was
dressing in her big corner room upstairs, with all the electric lights
lighted. The little girl could see them, if she turned her head, but
mother was very far away, in spite of that, for her door was locked, and
you could not go in. You could not watch her brush her long, wonderful
hair, or help her into her evening gown. Mother's evening gown was black
this summer, with shiny spangles--a fairy gown. Mother had to be alone
while she dressed, because she was going to the Everards'.

There were two Everards, the Colonel, who was old because his hair was
white, and his wife, who wore even more beautiful clothes than mother.
She had heard her father say that the Colonel had made the town, and she
had heard Norah, the cook, say that he owned the town. She had an idea
that these two things were not quite the same, though they sounded
alike, for father was fond of the Colonel, and Norah was not. At any
rate, he was president of the bank--father and Norah agreed about
that--and he lived in a house at the edge of the town, in what used to
be a part of Larribees' woods. Father used to go Mayflowering there, but
now nobody could.

The house was ugly, with things sticking out all over it, towers and
balconies and cupolas, and it was the little girl's twin. She was born
the year the Everards settled in Green River.

"And you're marked with it," Norah said, in one of their serious talks,
when Mollie, the second girl, was out, and the two had the kitchen to
themselves. Norah was peeling apples for a pie, and allowing her
unlimited ginger-snaps, straight from the jar. "Marked with it, Miss
Judy."

"What?"

"That house, and what goes on in it."

"What does go on?"

"You'll know soon enough."

"I'm not marked with it. I've got a birthmark, but it's a strawberry, on
my left side, like the princesses have in the fairy tales."

"You are a kind of a princess, Miss Judy."

"Is that a bad thing to be, Nana?"

"It's a lonesome thing."

"My strawberry's fading. Mother says it will go away."

"It won't go away. What we're born to be, we will be, Miss Judy----.
Bless your heart, you're crying, with the big eyes of you. What for,
dear?"

"I don't know. I don't want to be a princess. I don't want to be
lonesome. I hate the Everards."

"Well, there's many to say that now, and there'll be more to say it
soon." Norah muttered this darkly, into her yellow bowl of apples, but
Judith heard: "Here, eat this apple, child. You musn't hate anybody."

"I do. I hate the Everards."

Queer things came into your head to say when you were talking with
Norah, who had an aunt with the second sight, and told beautiful fairy
tales herself, and even believed in fairies; Judith did not. The
Everards gave Judith and no other little girl in town presents at
Christmas, and invited Judith and no other little girl to lunch. They
had a great deal to do with her trouble, her serious trouble, which she
would not discuss even with Norah. But she did not really hate the
Everards--certainly not to-night. She was too happy.

Judith was going out to hang May-baskets.

So was every other little girl in town who wanted to, and it was a
wonderful thing to be doing to-night. It was really May night, by the
weather as well as the calendar--the kind of night that Norah's fairies
meant should come on the first of May: warm, with a tiny chill creeping
into the air as the dark came, a pleasant, shivery chill, as if there
might really be fairies or ghosts about. It was still and clear. One
star, that had just come up above the horse-chestnut tree, looked very
small and bright and close, as if it had climbed up into the sky out of
the dark, clustering leaves of the tree.

This was the star that Judith usually wished on, but she could wish on
the moon to-night; Norah had told her so; wish once instead of three
nights running, and get her wish whether she thought of the red fox's
tail or not. The new moon of May was a wishing moon.

A wishing moon! The small white figure on the steps cuddled itself into
a smaller heap. Judith sighed happily and closed her eyes. She was going
with the others. She had her wish already.

It was Judith's great trouble that she was not like other little girls.
Until she was six Judith had a vague idea that she was the only child in
the world. Then she tried to make friends with two small, dirty girls
over the back fence, and found out that there were other children, but
she must not play with them. One day Norah found her crying in the
nursery because she could not think what to play, and soon after Willard
Nash, the fat little boy next door, came to dinner and into her life,
and after that, Eddie and Natalie Ward, from the white house up the
street, and Lorena Drew, from over the river. Still other children came
to her parties, so many that she could not remember their names. Then
Judith's trouble began. She was not like them.

She did not look like them; her clothes were not made by a seamstress,
but came from city shops, and had shorter skirts, and stuck out in
different places. She could not do what they did; Mollie called for her
at nine at evening parties, and she usually had to go to bed half an
hour after dinner, before it was dark. She had to do things that they
did not do: make grown-up calls with her mother and wear gloves, and
take lessons in fancy dancing instead of going to dancing school.

But she had gone to school now for almost a year, a private school in
the big billiard-room at the Larribees', but a real school, with other
children in it. They did not make fun of her clothes, or the way she
pronounced her words, very often now. She belonged to a secret society
with Rena and Natalie. She had spent one night with Natalie, though she
had to come home before breakfast. The other children did not know she
was different, but Judith knew.

Unexpected things might be required of her at a moment's notice: to be
excused from school and pass cakes at a tea at the Everards'; to leave a
picnic before the potatoes were roasted, because Mollie had appeared,
inexorable; unaccountable things, but she was to be safe to-night. May
night was not such a wonderful night for any little girl as it was for
Judith.

The lights were on in Nashs' parlour, and not turned off in the
dining-room, which meant that the rest of the family were not through
supper, but Willard was. Presently she heard three loud, unmelodious
whistles, his private signal, and a stocky figure pushed itself through
a gap in the hedge which looked, and was, too small for it, and Judith
rubbed her eyes and sat up--it crossed the lawn to her.

"Good morning, Merry Sunshine," said Willard, ironically.

"I wasn't asleep."

"You were."

"I heard you coming."

"You did not."

"I did so."

These formalities over, she made room for him eagerly on the steps.
Willard looked fatter to Judith after a meal, probably because she knew
how much he ate. His clean collar looked much too clean and white in the
dark, and he was evidently in a teasing mood, but such as he was, he
was her best friend, and she needed him.

"Willard, guess what I'm going to do?"

"I don't know, kid." Willard's tone implied unmistakably that he did not
want to know.

"To-night!"

Judith's voice thrilled. Willard stared at her. Her eyes looked wider
than usual, and very bright. She was smiling a strange little smile, and
a rare dimple, which he really believed she had made with a slate
pencil, showed in her cheek. The light in her face was something new to
him, something he did not understand, and therefore being of masculine
mind, wished to remove.

"You're going to miss it to-night for one thing, kid," he stated
deliberately.

"Oh, am I?" Judith dimpled and glowed.

"We're going to stay out until ten. Vivie's not going." Willard's big
sister had chaperoned the expedition the year before. Now it was to go
out unrestrained into the night.

"That's lovely."

Willard searched his brain for more overwhelming details.

"We've got a dark lantern."

"That's nice."

"I got it. It's father's. He won't miss it. It's hidden in the Drews'
barn. We're going to meet at the Drews, to fool them. They'll be
watching the Wards'."

"They will?"

"Sure."

"The--paddies?"

"Sure."

Judith drew an awed, ecstatic breath. He was touching now on the chief
peril and charm of the expedition. Hanging May-baskets, conferring an
elaborately-made gift upon a formal acquaintance, was not the object of
it--nothing so philanthropic; it was the escape after you had hung them.
You went out for adventure, to ring the bell and get away, to brave the
dangers of the night in small, intimate companies. And the chief danger,
which you fled from through the dark, was the paddies.

She did not know much about them. She would not show her ignorance by
asking questions. But there were little boys with whom a state of war
existed. They chased you, even fought with you, made a systematic
attempt to steal your May-baskets. They were mixed up in her mind with
gnomes and pirates. She was deliciously afraid of them. She hardly
thought they had human faces. She understood that they were most of them
Irish, and that it was somehow a disgrace for them to be Irish, though
her own Norah was Irish and proud of it.

"Sure!" said Willard. "Irish boys. Paddies from Paddy Lane. Ed got a
black eye last year. We'll get back at them. It will be some evening."
Judith did not look jealous or wistful yet. "The whole crowd's going."

"Yes, I know," thrilled Judith. "Oh, Willard----"

"Oh, Willard," he mimicked. Judith pronounced all the letters in his
name, which was not the popular method. "Oh, Willard, what do you think
I heard Viv say to the Gaynor girl about you?"

"Don't know. Willard, won't the paddies see the dark lantern?"

"Viv said you were as pretty as a doll, but just as stiff and stuck-up,"
pronounced Willard sternly. "And your father's only the cashier of the
bank, and just because the Everards have taken your mother up is no
reason for her to put on airs and get a second girl and get into
debt----"

He broke off, discouraged. Judith did not appear to hear him. After the
masculine habit, as he could not control the situation, he rose to
leave.

"Well, so long, kid. I've got to go to the post-office."

Even the mention of this desirable rendezvous, which was denied to her
because Mollie always brought home the evening mail in a black silk
bag, did not dim the dancing light in Judith's eyes. She put a hand on
his sleeve.

"Willard----"

"Well, kid?"

"Willard, don't you wish I was going to-night?"

"What for, to fight the paddies, or carry the dark lantern?"

"I could fight," said Judith, with a little quiver in her voice, as if
she could.

"Fight? You couldn't even run away. They'd"--Willard hissed it
mysteriously--"they'd get you."

"No, they wouldn't, because"--something had happened to her eyes, so
that they did not look tantalizing--"you'd take care of me, Willard,"
she announced surprisingly, "wouldn't you?"

"Forget it," murmured Willard, flattered.

"Wouldn't you?"

"I----"

"Willard!"

"Yes."

"Well--I am. Father made mother let me. I'm going with you."

The words she had been trying to say were out at last in a hushed voice,
because her heart was beating hard, but they sounded beautiful to her,
like a kind of song. Perhaps Willard heard it, too. He really was her
best friend, and he did not look so fat, after all, in the twilight. She
waited breathlessly.

"You are?"

Judith nodded. She could not speak.

"Well!" Willard's feelings were mixed, his face was not fashioned to
express a conflict of emotions, and words failed him, too. "You're a
queer kid. Why didn't you tell me before?"

"Aren't you glad, Willard?"

"You'll get sleepy."

"Aren't you glad?"

"Sure I'm glad. But you can't run, and you are a cry-baby."

These were known facts, not insults, but now Judith's eyes had stopped
dancing.

"Judy, are you mad with me?"

"No."

"You're the queerest kid." Up the street, he caught sight of a member of
a simpler sex than Judith's. "There's Ed coming out of the gate. I've
got to see him about something. See you later. Don't be mad. So long!"

The house was astir behind Judith. Father was opening and shutting
doors, and hunting for things. Norah was helping mother into her wraps
and scolding. Somebody was telephoning. Mother's carriage was late.

But it was turning into the yard now, a big, black hack from the Inn,
with a white horse. Judith liked white horses best. The front door
opened, and her father, very tall and blond, with his shirt-front
showing white, and her mother, with something shiny in her black hair,
swept out.

"Look who's here," said her father, and picked her up with his hands
under her elbows. "Going to paint the town red to-night, son?"

"Red?" breathed Judith. How strong father was, and how beautiful mother
was. She smelled of the perfume in the smallest bottle on the
toilet-table. How kind they both were. "Red?"

"Harry, you see she doesn't care a thing about going. She'd be better
off in bed. Careful, baby! Your hair is catching on my sequins. Put her
down, Harry. You'll spoil the shape of her shoulders some day."

"Don't you want to go, son?"

"I--" Judith choked, "I----"

"Well, she's not crazy about it, is she?"

"Then do send her to bed."

"No, you can't break your promise to a child, Minna."

"Prig," said mother sweetly, as if a prig were a pleasant thing to be.
"All right, let her go, then. Oh, Harry, look at that horse. They've
sent us the knock-kneed old white corpse again."

Mother hurried him into the carriage, and it clattered out of the yard.
They did not look back. They were always in a hurry, and rather cross
when they went to the Everards. For once she was glad to see them go,
such a dreadful crisis had come and passed. How could father think she
did not want to go, father who used to hang May-baskets himself? Norah
was calling her, but she did not answer. Norah was cross to-night. She
did not know how happy Judith was.

Nobody knew, but now Judith did not want to tell. She did not want
sympathy. She was not lonely. This secret was too important to tell.
And, before her eyes, a lovely and comforting thing was happening,
silently and suddenly, as lovely things do happen. Quite still on the
steps, a white little figure, alone in a preoccupied world, but calm in
spite of it, Judith looked and looked.

Above the horse-chestnut tree, so filmy and faint that the star looked
brighter than ever, so pale that it was not akin to the stars or the
flickering lights in the street, but to the dark beyond, where
adventures were, so friendly and sweet that it could make the wish in
your heart come true, whether you were clever enough to wish it out loud
or not, hung the wishing moon.




CHAPTER TWO


A small, silent procession was edging its way along Church Street,
darkly silhouetted against a faintly starred sky. It was a long hour
later now, and looked later still on Church Street. There were few
lights left in the string of houses near the white church, at the lower
end of the street, and here, at the upper end, there were no lights but
the one street lamp near the railroad bridge that arched black overhead,
and there were few houses. The street did not look like a street at all,
but a country road, and a muddy one.

The narrow board sidewalk creaked, so the procession avoided it, and
stuck to the muddy side of the road.

The procession looked mysterious enough, even if you were walking at the
tail of it and carrying a heavy market basket; if you had to smell the
lantern, swung just in front of you, but did not have the fun of
carrying it; if a shaker cloak, hooded and picturesque, in the
procession, hampered your activities; if you had questions to ask, and
nobody answered you.

"Willard."

"Sh!"

One by one, they came into sight, in the wavering light of the street
lamp, and melted into the dark under the bridge; Ed, in his white
sweater, captaining them, and keenly aware of it; Rena and Natalie, with
the larger market basket between them; Willard, bulky in two sweaters,
and tenderly shielding his lantern with a third, and Judith. Her face
showed pale with excitement against the scarlet of her hood. One hand
plucked vainly at Willard's sleeve; he stalked on, and would not turn.
Only these five, but they had consulted and organized and reorganized
for half an hour in the Drews' barn before they started, and had hung
only three May-baskets yet. However, the adventure was under way now.

"Willard, now it's my turn to carry the lantern."

"Judy, you can't."

"Why?"

"It might explode." The feeble flame gave one dispirited upward spurt at
this encouragement, causing excitement in front.

"Oh, Ed!"

"Ed, make him put it out."

"Rena and Nat, you keep still. Judy's not scared, are you Judy?"

"No! Oh, no!"

"The lantern's a sick looking sight, and he can carry it
if he wants to, but we don't need it."

"I like that. You tried to get me to let you carry it, Ed."

"Don't talk so much."

"Who started the talk?"

"Well, who's running this, anyway--you, Willard Nash?"

"There's a dog in that house."

"Sh!"

"But that dog's only a cocker spaniel. He can't hurt you."

"Judy, sh!"

Sh! Somebody was always saying that. It was part of the ceremony, which
had been the same all three times. The procession was halting opposite
the Nealy house. A whispered quarrel started every time they approached
a house, and was hushed halfway through and not taken up again. The
quarrel and the hush were part of the ceremony, too.

The Nealy house was small and harmless looking, and entirely dark, but
they did not allow that to make them reckless. They stood looking warily
across the dark street.

"But there's nobody there. Maggie Nealy's out, too, to-night, and her
mother----"

"Sh!" Willard put a hand over Judith's mouth. It smelled of kerosene,
and she struggled, but did not make a noise. Just at this dramatic
moment the Nealy's dog barked.

Judith could hear her heart beat and feel her damp feet getting really
wet and cold.

"Now," Ed whispered, close to her ear and uncomfortably loud, and she
fumbled in her basket. Willard jiggled the lantern dizzily over her
shoulder, tissue paper tore under her fingers, and bonbons rattled.
Hanging May-baskets was certainly hard on the May-baskets, and they were
so pretty; pale coloured, like flowers.

"I can't find the right one. The marks are all falling off. The candy's
falling out."

"We can't stand here all night. Here----"

"Willard, take your hands out. Not that one----"

"Willard and Judy stop fighting. That one will do. I'm going."

There was dead silence now, and Ed, clutching the wreck of a sizable
crêpe-paper creation to the bosom of his white sweater, doubled into a
crouching, boy scout attitude, crossed the road, and approached the
house. Nothing but his own commendable caution delayed his approach. The
small dog's dreams within were untroubled now. There were no signs of
life.

He reached the front door, deposited the May-basket with a force that
further demolished it, and took to his heels. After another breathless
wait the procession formed behind him and trailed after him up the road,
hilly here, so that the market basket grew heavier.

"Some evening," Willard murmured to himself, not the rest of the world,
but he sounded amiable.

"Willard."

"Well, kid."

"There wasn't anybody in that house. Ed knew it."

"There might have been. They might have come home."

"But they didn't ... Willard, is this all there is to it?"

"What?"

"Hanging May-baskets. Throwing them down that way. I thought maybe they
really hung them, on the doorknob--I thought----"

"Silly! Ed's going cross lots, and up the wood road to Larribees'. Good
work. That will throw them off the track."

"Throw who off the track?"

"You scared? Want to go home?"

"Oh, no! But who? There's nobody chasing us. Nobody."

"No. We've got them fooled. It's some evening."

"Willard, where are the paddies?"

That was the question Judith had been wanting to ask more and more, for
an hour, but it came in a choked voice, and nobody heard. They were
plunging into a rough and stubbly wood lot, and hushing each other
excitedly. Twigs caught at Judith's skirt, and it was hard to see your
way, with the moon, small and high above the trees in Larribee's woods,
only making the trees look darker. The wood road was little used and
overgrown.

"If they get us in here!"

"They won't, Willard." Judith's voice trembled.

"Cry-baby!"

"I am not."

"Here, buck up. We're coming out right here, back of the carriage house.
If Ed catches you crying he'll send you home."

But Ed had his mind upon higher things. "You girls stay here with the
baskets. Don't move. Willard, you go right and I'll go left, and we'll
meet at the carriage-house steps, if the coast is clear."

"If they get us----"

If! The boys crunched out of hearing on the gravel, awesome silence set
in, and Rena and Natalie whispered; Judith was not to be awed. Four
May-baskets hung, and nobody objecting; dark cross-streets chosen
instead of Main Street and no danger pursuing them there. If there was
no danger in the whole town, why should there be in one little strip of
woods, though it was dark and strange, and full of whispering noises?
Judith had clung to Willard's hand in terror, turning into the
cross-streets, and nothing came of it. She was not to be fooled any
longer. There was no danger.

Not that she wanted to be chased. She did not know what she wanted. But
she had come out into the dark to find something that was not there. She
had been happier on the doorsteps thinking about it. This, then, was
hanging May-baskets--all there was to it. But it was pleasant here in
the dark, pleasanter than walking through mud, and quarrelling. Now Rena
and Nat were quarrelling again.

"Get back there! Ed said not to move."

"They've been gone too long. Something's the matter."

"There they come. I hear them. Get back!"

They were coming, but something else was happening. Willard's three
whistles sounded, then Ed's voice, and a noise of scuffling on the
gravel--and a new boy's voice.

Rena and Natalie, upsetting their basket as they started, and not
noticing it, pushed through the trees and ran. Judith stood still and
listened. She did not know the voice. It was shrill and clear. She could
hear the words it said above the others' voices, all clamouring, now, at
once. She held her breath and listened. She could not move.

"I don't want your damn May-baskets."

"Liar! Get back of him, Rena. Come on, Nat."

"You'll get hurt. Let me go."

"Liar--Paddy!"

The magic word fell unheeded. The boy was laughing, and the laugh filled
her ears, a splendid laugh, fearless and clear.

"Paddy!"

"I don't want your damn May-baskets."

"Paddy--Paddy!"

This time there was no answer. Judith, tearing at the hooks of her cape,
and throwing it off as she ran, broke through the circling trees. Then
she stopped and looked.

Rena stood high on the carriage-house steps and held the lantern. It
wavered and swung in her hand, and threw a flickering circle of light
round the group by the steps.

The sprawled shadows at their feet seemed to have an undue number of
arms and legs, and the children were a struggling, uncertain mass of
motion, hard to make out, like the shadows, but they were only four:
Willard, grunting and groaning; Natalie attacking spasmodically in the
rear, and the strange little boy, the enemy. He was the heart of the
struggling group, and Judith looked only at him. She could do nothing
but look, for Judith had never seen a little boy like this.

They were three against one, and the one was a match for them. He was
slender and strong, holding his ground and making no noise. He was
coatless and ragged shirted, and one sleeve of his shirt was torn, so
that you could see how thin his shoulder was. He held his head high, and
smiled as he fought. A shock of blond hair was tossed high above his
forehead. He had a thin, white face, and dark jewels of flashing eyes.
As she stood and looked, they met Judith's eyes, and Judith knew that
she had never seen a boy like this, because there was no boy like
this--no little boy so wild and strange and free, so ragged and brave.
If he could come out of the dark, it was full of unguessable things,
splendid and strange and new. Judith's heart beat hard, a hot feeling
swept over her, and a queer mist came before her eyes. A wonderful boy;
a fairy boy! What would they do to him? What did they do to paddies?
There was no little boy like this in the world.

"Judy!" The others had seen her and were calling her. "Come on. Help get
him down."

"He chased Willard round here."

"He led the gang last year."

"It's Neil Donovan."

"Get him down!"

Judith did not answer then. Her cheeks flamed red, and her eyes looked
as big and dark as the stranger's, and her small hands clenched tight.
It was only a minute that she stood so. The three were close to him,
hiding him. She saw his face again, above Willard's pushing shoulder,
and then--she could not see it.

"Judy, what's the matter? Come on!"

And Judith came. She plunged straight into the struggling group, and
hammered at it indiscriminately with two small fists. She caught at a
waving coat sleeve, and pulled it--Willard's, and it tore in her hands.
She spotted Eds white sweater, and beat at it fiercely, with all her
strength.

"That's me, Judy. Cut it out!"

"Then let him go. Three to one is no fair. Let him go!" They did not
hear her, or care which side she was on, or take the trouble to drive
her away. Judith drew back and stood and looked at them, breathless and
glowing and undefeated, for one long minute.

"Boy," she called then, softly, as if he could hear when the others
could not, "wait! It's all right, boy. It's all right."

Then she charged up the steps at Rena. Judy, the most demure and
faithful of allies, confronted Rena, amazingly but unmistakably changed
to a foe; Judy, with her immaculate and enviable frock smirched and
torn, and her sleek hair wildly tossed, her cheeks darkly flushed, and
her eyes strange and shining; a Judy to be reckoned with and admired and
feared--a new Judy.

"What's the matter? Are you crazy? What do you want?"

"Make them let him go. They've got to let him go."

"He's a paddy--Neil Donovan--a paddy."

"They've got to let him go.... Give that to me."

"What for? Judy, don't hurt me. Judy!"

Judith wasted no more words. She caught Rena's wrist, twisted it, and
snatched the lantern out of her hand. She held it high above her head,
and shook it recklessly.

"Don't, Judy! Don't!" The flame sputtered crazily. Judy still shook the
lantern, dancing out of reach, and laughing. "Nat--everybody--stop Judy.
She's making the lantern explode. Oh, Ed!"

Natalie heard, and then the others. They looked up at her, all of them.
Rena and Natalie screamed. Willard started toward her. "Put it down,
kid," he was calling.

"I'll put it down.... Now boy."

There he was, with Ed's arm gripping his shoulders. He did not give any
sign that he knew she was trying to help him, or that he wanted help. He
was not afraid of the lantern, like the others. His black eyes were
laughing at all of them--laughing at Judith, too. He was looking
straight at Judith.

"Now, boy," she called, "now run!" and she gripped the lantern tight,
swung it high, and dashed it to the ground.

It fell at the foot of the steps with a crash of breaking glass. The
light sputtered out. The air was full of the smell of spilled kerosene.
In the faint radiance that was not moonlight, but a glimmering
reflection of it, more confusing than darkness, dim figures struggled
and shrill voices were lifted.

"Get him. Hold him."

"Get the lantern."

"Get Judy."

"Hold him, Ed."

"That's me."

"Get him, Rena."

Judith laughed, and out of the dark he had come from, the dark of
May-night, lit by a wishing moon, that grants your secret wish for
better or for worse, irrevocably, a far-away laugh answered Judith's.
The boy was gone.




CHAPTER THREE


Miss Judith Devereux Randall was getting into her first evening gown.

The Green River High School football team was giving its annual
September concert and ball in Odd Fellows' Hall to-night. The occasion
was as important to the school as a coming-out party. The new junior
class, just graduated from seclusion upstairs to the big assembly room
where the seniors were, made its first public appearance in society
there. Judith was a junior now.

Her first dance, and her first evening gown; it was a memorable scene,
fit to immortalize with the first love-letter and the first proposal, in
a series of pictures of great moments in a girl's life--chosen by some
masculine illustrator, touchingly confident that he knows what the great
moments of a girl's life are. Judith seemed to be taking this moment too
calmly for one.

The dress lay ready on the bed, fluffy and light and sheer, a white
dream of a dress, with two unopened florist's boxes beside it, but there
was no picturesque disarray of excited toilet-making in her big,
brightly lighted room, and no dream-promoting candlelight. And there
were no pennants or football trophies disfiguring the daintily flowered
wall paper, and no pictures or programs in the mirror of the dainty
dressing-table; there was no other young girl's room in town where they
were prohibited, but there was no other room so charming as Judith's,
all blue-flowered chintz and bird's-eye maple and white fur rugs, and
whiter covers and curtains.

Judith was the most charming and immaculate thing in the room, as she
stood before the cheval-glass, bare armed and slim and straight in
beruffled, beribboned white, pinning the soft, pale braids tight around
her small, high-poised head. Quite the most charming thing, and Norah,
fingering the dress on the bed disapprovingly, and giving her keen,
sidelong glances, was aware of it, but did not believe in compliments,
even to the creature she loved best in the world.

Her mouth was set and her brown eyes were bright with the effort of
repressing them. Judith, seeing her face in the glass, turned suddenly
and slipped her arms round the formidable old creature's neck, and
laughed at her.

"Don't you think I'm perfectly beautiful?" she demanded. "If you really
love me, why not tell me so?"

"Your colour's good." Judith pressed a delicately flushed cheek to
Norah's, and attempted a butterfly kiss, which she evaded grimly. "Good
enough--healthy and natural."

"Oh, no. I made it. Oh, with hot water and then cold, I mean. Nana,
don't begin about rouge. Don't be silly. That red stuff in the box on
mother's dresser is only nail paste, truly."

"Who sent the flowers?"

"Look and see."

"Much you care, if you'll let me look."

"Do you want me to care?"

"Much you care about the flowers or the party."

Judith had caught up the alluring dress without a second glance, and
slipped it expertly over her head, and was jerking capably at the
fastenings.

"With the spoiled airs of you, and Willard Nash sending to Wells for
flowers, when his father clerked in a drygoods store at his age----"

"Oh, carnations are cheap--or he wouldn't get them."

"These aren't cheap, then."

The smaller box was full of white violets.

"Give them to me. No, you can't see the card. You don't deserve to.
You're too cross, and besides you wouldn't like it. Do my two top hooks.
Now, am I perfectly beautiful?"

Under her capable hands a pretty miracle had been going on, common
enough, but always new. Ruffle above ruffle, the soft, shapeless mass of
white had shaken itself into its proper lines and contours, lightly,
like a bird's plumage settling itself, and with it the change that comes
when a woman with the inborn, unteachable trick of wearing clothes puts
on a perfect gown, had come to her slight girl's figure. It looked
softer, rounder, and more lightly poised. Her throat looked whiter above
the encircling folds of white. Her shy half smile was sweeter. The white
violets, caught to her high girdle, were sweeter, too.

Norah surrendered, her voice husky and reluctant.

"You're too good for them."

"For the G. H. S. dance? For Willard?" Judith pretended great humility:
"Nana!"

"There's others you're more than too good for. Others----"

"Nana, don't."

"Come here." Norah put two heavy hands on her shoulders and regarded her
grimly. It was the kind of look that Judith used to associate with
second sight, and dread. It was quite formidable still. But Judith met
it steadily, with something mature and assured about her look that had
nothing to do with the softness and sweetness of her in her fluffy
draperies, something that had no place in the heart of a child;
something that Norah saw.

"Too good for them, and you know it," pronounced Norah. "You know it too
well. You know too many things. A heart of gold you've got, but your
head will rule your heart."

"Nonsense." Norah permitted herself to be kissed, still looking
forbidding, but holding Judith tight.

"Little white lamb, may you find what's good enough for you," she
conceded, unexpectedly, "and may you know it when you find it."

"You're an old dear, and you're good enough for me."

Downstairs there was a more critical audience to face. Judith saw it in
the library door, and stood still on the stair landing, looking down.
She held her head high, and coloured faintly. She looked very slender
and white against the dark woodwork of the hall. The Randall house had
been renovated the year before--becoming ten years older in the process,
early Colonial instead of a comfortable mixture of late Colonial and
mid-Victorian. The hall was particularly Colonial, and a becoming
background for Judith, but the dark-haired lady in the door had no more
faith in compliments than Norah, and there was a worried wrinkle in her
low forehead to-night, as if her mind were on other things.

"Will I do, mother?"

"It's a good little gown, but there's something wrong with the neck
line. You're really going then?"

"I thought I would."

"Be back by half-past ten. We're going to have some cards here. The
Colonel likes you to pass things."

"I thought father's head ached."

"He's sleeping it off."

"I--wanted him to see how I looked."

"I can't see why you go."

"I thought I would. I'll go outside now, and wait for Willard."

Judith closed the early Colonial door softly behind her, and settled
down on the steps. She arranged her coat, not the one her mother lent
her for state occasions, but a white polo coat of her own, with due
regard for her ruffles and her violets. The violets were from Colonel
Everard. Norah, with her tiresome prejudice against the Everards, and
mother, who thought and talked so much about them that she was almost
tiresome, too, were both wrong about this party. She did want to go.

The church clock was striking nine. There was nothing deep toned or
solemn about the chime; it was rather tinny, but she liked it. It
sounded wide awake, as if things were going to happen. Nine, and the
party was under way. The concert was almost over. The concert was only
for chaperones and girls who were afraid of not getting their dance
orders filled. The truly elect arrived just in time to dance. Some of
them were passing the house already. Judith saw girls with
light-coloured gowns showing under dark coats, and swathing veils that
preserved elaborate coiffures. Bits of conversation, monosyllabic and
formal, to fit the clothes, drifted across the lawn to her.

She had not been allowed to help decorate the hall, but she had driven
with Willard to Nashes' Corners for goldenrod, and when they carried it
in, big, glowing bundles of it, she had seen fascinating things:
Japanese lanterns, cheesecloth in yellow and white, the school colours,
still in the piece, and full of unguessable possibilities, and a rough
board table, the foundation of the elaborately decorated counter where
Rena and other girls would serve the fruit punch. All the time she
dressed she had been listening for the music of Dugan's orchestra, and
caught only tantalizing strains of tunes that she could not identify.
There was a sameness about the repertoire. Most of the tunes sounded
unduly sentimental and resigned. But now they were playing their star
number, a dramatic piece of program music called "A Day on the
Battlefield."

The day began with bird notes and bugle calls, but was soon enlivened by
cavalry charges and cannonades. The drum, and an occasional blank
cartridge, very telling in effect, were producing them now. Judith
listened eagerly.

She needed friends of her own age for the next two years, but she must
not identify herself with them too closely, because she would have wider
social opportunities by and by; that was what her mother said, and she
did not contest it; by and by, but this party was to-night.

Willard was coming for her now, half an hour ahead of time, as usual. He
crossed the lawn, and sat heavily down on the steps.

"Hello. Don't talk," said Judith.

Willard was silent only long enough to turn this remark over in his
mind, and decide that she could not mean it, but that was five minutes,
for all his mental processes were slow. Down in the hall the last of the
heroes was dying, and Dugan's orchestra rendered Taps sepulchrally.
Judith drew a long breath of shivering content.

"Cold?" inquired Willard.

"No."

"You're looking great to-night."

"In the dark? In an old polo coat?"

"You always look great."

Judith was aware of an ominous stir beside her, and changed her
position.

"Oh, Judy."

"When you know I won't let you hold my hand, what makes you try?"

"If I didn't try, how would I know?" said Willard neatly.

"Oh, if you don't know without trying," Judith sighed. The cannonade in
the hall was over, and the night was empty without it.

"They took in thirteen dollars and fifty-two cents selling tickets for
to-night." Willard, checked upon sentimental subjects, proceeded to
facts. He had so many at command that he could not be checked.

"Who did?"

"The team. They divide it. Only this year they've got to let the
sub-team in on it, the faculty made them, and they're sore. And there's
a sub on the reception committee."

"I don't care."

"You ought to. A sub, and a roughneck. The sub-team is a bunch of
roughnecks, but he's the worst. On the reception committee! But they'll
take it out of him."

"Who? The reception committee?"

"No, the girls. They won't dance with him. He won't get a decent name on
his card. Roughneck, keeping Ed off the team. He's an Irish boy."

"An Irish boy?" Something, vague as an unforgotten dream that comes back
at night, though you are too busy to recall it in waking hours, urged
Judith to protest. "So is the senior president Irish."

"No, the vice-president." There was a wide distinction between the two
offices. "Besides"--this was a wider distinction--"Murph lives at the
Falls."

Living at the Falls, the little settlement at the head of the river, and
lunching at noon, in the empty schoolhouse, out of tin boxes, with a
forlorn assembly of half a dozen or so, was a handicap that few could
live down.

"Murph?"

"The team calls him Murphy. I don't know why. They're crazy about him.
He lives a half mile north of the Falls. Walking five miles a day to
learn Latin! He's a fool and a roughneck, but he can play ball.
Yesterday on Brown's field----"

Willard started happily upon technicalities of football formations.
Judith stopped listening. He could talk on unaided, pausing only for an
occasional yes or no.

Brown's field! It was a tree-fringed stretch of level grass set high at
the edge of the woods, on the other side of the river, with glimpses of
the river showing through the trees far below. Here, on long autumn
afternoons, sparkling and cool, but golden at the heart, ending
gloriously in red, sudden sunsets, football practice went on every day;
shifting here and there, mysteriously, over the field, the arbitrary
evolutions that were football, the shuffling, and shouting, and panting
silence; on rugs and sweaters under the trees, an audience of girls,
shivering delightfully, or holding some hero's sweater, too proud to be
cold.

Judith had seen all this through Willard's eyes, or from a passing
carriage, but now she would go herself, go perhaps every day. Her mother
would let her. She would not understand, but she would let her, just as
she had to-night. Judith could be part of the close-knit life of the
school in the last two years there--the years that counted. The party
was a test and her mother had met it favourably. That was why she was
glad to go, as nearly as she understood. She did not know quite what she
wanted of the party, only how very much she wanted to go.

Willard was asking a question insistently: "Didn't he do pretty work?"

"Who?"

"Why, the fellow I'm telling you about--the roughneck."

"Roughneck," said Judith dreamily. The word had a fine, strong sound.
Willard was holding her hand again, and she felt too comfortable and
content to stop him.

The orchestra down the street was playing the number that usually ended
its programs, a medley of plantation melodies. They were never such a
strain on the resources of a hard-working but only five-piece orchestra
as the ambitious, martial selections, and here, heard across the dark,
they were beautiful: plaintive and thrillingly sweet. "Old Kentucky
Home," was the sweetest of all, lonely and sad as youth, and insistent
as youth, claiming its own against an alien world.

"Oh, Willard!" breathed Judith. Then, in quite another tone, "Oh,
Willard!"

Encouraged by her silence, he was reaching for her other hand, and
slipping an arm round her waist.

"You feel so soft," objected Judith frankly, getting up. "I do hope I'll
never fall in love with a fat man. Come on, let's go!"

She waited for him politely on the sidewalk, and permitted her arm to
be duly grasped. Willard, sulky and silent, but preserving appearances,
piloted her dutifully down the street. Willard's silences were rare, and
Judith usually made the most of them, but she did not permit this one to
last. She did not want any one, even Willard, to be unhappy to-night.

"Willard."

"What?"

"Don't take such long steps, or I can't keep up with you. You're so
tall."

"Do you want to be late?"

"Oh, no! Are we?"

"No."

"But there's only one couple behind us, and the music's stopped."

"It takes half an hour to get the chairs moved out."

"Willard."

"Well?"

"Is the first dance a grand march and circle?"

"No, that's gone out. They have contras instead, but the first is a
waltz."

"Willard, mother said I mustn't dance contras, but I shall--with you."

"Well!"

"Don't you want me to?"

"Yes."

"Willard, are you cross with me?"

"No." They were in front of the Odd Fellows' Building now. The door was
open. The pair behind them crowded past and clattered hurriedly up the
bare, polished stairs. The orchestra could be heard tuning industriously
above. They were almost late, but Willard drew her into a corner of the
entrance hall, and pressed her hand ardently.

"Judy, I couldn't be cross with you."

"Don't be too sure!" Judith laughed, and ran upstairs ahead of him.

"There's the ladies' dressing-room. I'll get the dance orders and meet
you outside."

There was a whispering, giggling crowd in the dressing-room, mostly
seniors, girls she did not know, but they seemed to know her, and she
was conscious of curious looks at her hair and dress. It was the
simplest dress in the room, and her mother would not have approved of
the other dresses, but Judith did. There was something festive about the
bright colours, too bright most of them: sharp pinks, and cold, hard
blues. There was a yellow dress on a brunette, who was cheapened by the
crude colour, and a scarlet dress too bright for any one to wear
successfully on a big, pretty blond girl, who almost could. Judith
smelled three distinct kinds of cheap talcum powder, and preferred them
all to her own unscented French variety. She had a moment of sudden
loneliness. Was she so glad to be here, after all?

It was only a moment. The tuning of instruments outside broke off, and
the first bars of a waltz droned invitingly out: "If you really love
me," the song that had been in her ears all the evening, a flimsy ballad
of the year, hauntingly sweet, as only such short-lived songs can be.
Moving to the tune of it, Judith crowded with the other girls out of the
dressing-room.

The hall was transformed. It was not the room she had dreamed of, a
great room, dimly lit, peopled with low-talking dancers, circling
through the dimness. The place looked smaller decorated, and the
decorations themselves seemed to have shrunk since she saw them. The
lanterns had been hung only where nails were already driven, and under
the supervision of the janitor, who would not permit them to be lighted.
The cheesecloth was conspicuous nowhere except around the little stage,
which it draped in tight, mathematically measured festoons. Beneath,
under the misleading legend, "G. H. S.," painted in yellow on a
suspended football, Dugan's orchestra performed its duties faithfully,
with handkerchiefs guarding wilted collars.

The goldenrod, tortured and wired into a screen to hide the footlights,
was drooping away already and showing the supporting wires. The benches
were stacked against the wall, all but an ill-omened row designed for
wall-flowers, and the floor was cleared and waxed. But little patches of
wax that were not rubbed in lurked for unwary feet, and there were
clouds of dust in the air. In one corner of the hall most of the
prominent guests of the evening were attempting to obtain dance orders
at once, or to push their way back with them to the young ladies they
were escorting.

These ladies, and other ladies without escorts, were crowding each other
against the stacked benches and maneuvering for positions where their
dance orders would fill promptly. The atmosphere was one of strife and
stress. But Judith found no fault with it. She was not aware of it.

In a corner near the stage, by the closed door of the refreshment-room,
a boy was standing alone. He was tearing up his dance order. It was
empty, and he was making no further attempts to fill it. He tore it
quite unostentatiously so that no young lady disposed to be amused by
his defeat could see anything worth staring at in his performance, and
he was forgotten in his corner. But Judith stared.

She had remembered him tall, but he was only a little taller than
herself. His black suit was shiny, and a size too small for him, but it
was carefully brushed, and he wore it with an air. His hair was darker
than she remembered, a pale, soft brown. It was too long, and it curled
at the temples. He stood squarely, facing the room, as if he did not
care what anybody did to him, but there was a look about his mouth as if
he cared. He raised his eyes. They were darker than she remembered,
darker and stranger than any eyes in the world. They looked hurt, but
there was a laugh in them, too, and across the hall they were looking
straight at Judith.

"Here you are. I've got myself down for all your contras. Just in time."

Willard, mopping his brow, slipping on a patch of wax, and saving
himself with a skating motion, brought up triumphantly beside her,
waving two dance orders. Judith pushed them away, and said
something--she hardly knew what.

"What, Judy? What's that? You're engaged for this? You can't dance it
with me?"

"No. No, I can't."

Judith slipped past him, and started across the floor. The music was
louder now, as if you were really meant to dance, and dance with the
person you wanted to most. The floor was filling now with dancers
stepping forward awkwardly, but turning into different creatures when
they danced, caught by the light, sure swing of the music, whirling and
gliding. The words sang themselves to Judith, the silly, beautiful
words:

    Please don't keep me waiting.
      Won't you let me know
    That you really love me?
      Tell--me--so.

A girl in red was dancing in a quick, darting sort of way, in and out,
among the others, and her dress was beautiful, too, like a flower. The
boy in the corner was watching it. He did not see Judith come.

"I thought you couldn't be real. When I never saw you again I thought I
had dreamed you."

Judith said it softly and breathlessly, and he did not hear. She put her
hand on his arm, and he turned and looked at her.

"Don't you remember me?" Judith was too happy to be hurt even by this.
The light, sweet music called to her. "Don't you remember? Never mind!
Come and dance with me."




CHAPTER FOUR


Willard stood still and stared after Judith for one bewildered minute;
that was as long as he could stand still. Odd Fellows' Hall had ceased
to afford standing-room.

The floor was filling and more than filling with determined young
persons who were there to dance, and looked as if they had never had any
aim but to dance. The enthralled silence, which was more general than
conversation, advertised it. Even acknowledged belles, like the girl in
red, coquetted incidentally, with significant but brief confidences and
briefer upward glances. There was an alarming concentration, intent as
youth itself, to be read in their unsmiling faces and eager eyes.

They danced quite wonderfully, most of them, as only country-bred young
people can, with free-limbed young bodies, more used to adventuring in
the open air than to dancing, but attuned to the rhythm of the dance by
right of their youth. The old-fashioned waltz, that our grandmothers
lost their hearts to the time of, still prevailed in Green River; not
the jerkier performance that was already opening the way for the
one-step and the dance craze in larger centres, but the old waltz, with
the first beat of each measure heavily emphasized--a slow swinging,
beautiful dance, and they danced it with all their hearts.

In and out among them, two slender, quick-turning figures were making an
intricate way. The girl danced delicately and surely, a faint, half
smile parting her lips, her small, smooth head erect, the silvery gold
hair that crowned it shimmering and pale in the uncompromising light of
the newly installed electric chandeliers, her eyes intent on the boy.

His performance was not expert, but it had a charm all its own. He put a
great deal of strength into it, and made it evident that he possessed
still more; strength enough to master the art of dancing once and for
all, by the sheer force of it, if he cared to exert it, and a laughing
light in his eyes, as if dancing was not important enough for that, and
nothing else was.

An ambitious pair, experimenting with the dip waltz, just introduced
that year, and pausing on the most awkward spots in the crowded floor,
blocked his path, and he swung heavily out of their way just in time,
squaring his chin and holding his head a shade higher. The girl in red
was whirled toward him in double-quick time, and he dodged,
miscalculated his distance, but met the shock of her squarely, whisking
Judith out of her way.

"Good try, Murph," her partner called.

Willard regarded the encounter disapprovingly from the door of the
gentlemen's dressing-room, to which he had edged his way. His was not an
expressive countenance, and that was a protection to him just now. He
was bewildered and deeply hurt, but he merely looked fat and slightly
puzzled, as usual.

"Judy turn you down?" inquired his friend Mr. Ward, also watching from
the dressing-room door, with the few other gentlemen who were without
partners for this dance. It was the most important dance of the evening,
for you danced it with the lady of your choice, or with nobody. It
cemented new intimacies or foreshadowed the breaking of old; settled
anew the continually agitated question of "who was going with who."

"Judy turn you down?" said Mr. Ward, but he meant it as a pleasantry.
Mr. Willard Nash was not often turned down, even at this early age. He
was too eligible.

"Rena turn you down, Ed?"

"Yes." Mr. Ward became suddenly confidential, and lowered his voice.
"Mad. She wanted me to get her a shinguard to mount tintypes
on--tintypes of the team."

"Buy it or steal it?" inquired Willard sarcastically.

"I offered to buy it," his friend confessed, "buy her a new pair, but
she wants one that's been used."

"You spoil Rena. You can't spoil a girl." They laughed wisely. "It don't
pay."

"Mad with Judy?"

"Well--no," said Willard magnanimously. He thought quite rapidly, as his
brain, not overworked at other times, could do in emergencies. "My feet
hurt. Pumps slip at the heel. I've been stuffing them out. Judy came
with me, but I had to be excused for this dance."

"Good thing for him."

"Who?"

"For Murph--for Neil Donovan. They'll all dance with him if she does;
though Judy don't know that. She's not stuck on herself, and never will
be. I didn't know she knew Murph."

"Well, you know it now," said Willard shortly, his man-of-the-world
composure failing him. Judith was circling nearer now, slender and
desirable. He hesitated between an angry glare and a forgiving smile,
but she did not look to see which he chose. She whirled quickly by.

"Smooth little dancer, and she's no snob. Judy's all right," said Ed.
"Watch Murph! He's catching on--never danced till last night. Some of
the fellows taught him. He never danced with a girl before."

"If my feet hurt," remarked Mr. Nash irrelevantly, and without the close
attention from his friend which this important announcement called for,
"I may not dance at all to-night."

Willard stopped abruptly. "What do you know about that"; a voice was
saying, in the rear of the dressing-room; he stiffly refrained from
turning to see whose, "Judith is dancing the first dance with Neil
Donovan!"

Judith was dancing the first dance with Neil Donovan. It was social
history already, accepted as such, and not further discussed, even by
Willard. But many epoch-making events are not even so much discussed,
they look so simple on the face of them. We cross a room, and change the
course of our lives by crossing it, and few people even observe that we
have crossed the room.

If Judith had affected the course of her life materially by crossing the
room to the strange boy, she did not seem to be thinking of it just now.
She was not thinking at all. She was only dancing, following her
partner's erratic course quite faithfully, and quite intent on doing so;
feeling every beat of the music, and showing it, pink-cheeked and
sparkling eyed, and pleasantly excited, but nothing more.

The wistful and dreamy look was gone from her eyes, and her half-formed
desire for something to happen this evening, something that had never
happened before, was gone from her, too. She felt content with whatever
was going to happen, and deeply interested in it, and particularly
interested in dancing.

They had danced almost in silence, rather a grim silence at first, but
now that the boy could let the music carry him with it, and was
beginning to trust it, too, the silence was comfortable. But the few
words he managed to say were worth listening to and answering, not to be
dreamed through and ignored, like Willard's. His voice was not as she
remembered it, and that was interesting, too, deeply significant, though
she could not have said why. Everything seemed unaccountably interesting
to-night.

"I thought it was louder," she said, "or higher--or something."

"What?"

"Your voice."

It was quite husky and low, and he pronounced a word here and there with
a brogue like Norah's, only pleasanter, with a kind of singing sound.
It was never the word you expected. You had to watch for it. She could
hear it now.

"Won't you please tell me who you are?"

"I know who you are, and I know where you live."

"Where do I?"

"At the Falls, and I know when you moved there--five years ago, or six."

"Six. How do you know?"

"Oh, I know."

As you grew older, and learned to call more boys and girls in the school
by name, and more of the clerks in the shops, you discovered new people
in the town where you thought you knew everybody, and it made the town
infinitely large. But this boy had not been so near her, or she would
have seen him. He could not have been in school with her. He must have
worked on a farm and studied by himself with the grammar-school teacher
at the Falls, and taken special examinations to enter the Junior class
this year, as Willard said that some boy at the Falls was doing. He must
be that boy or Judith would surely have seen him.

She nodded her head wisely. "I know."

"You know a lot." In his soft brogue this sounded like the most
complimentary thing that could be said.

"But you don't remember me." This had troubled her at first. Now it
seemed like the most delicious of jokes, and they laughed at it
together.

"That was the first thing you said to me."

"Isn't it queer"--Judith's eyes widened and darkened as if it were
something more than queer, something far worse--"so queer! I can't think
what the first thing was that you said to me."

They confronted this problem in silence, staring at each other with
wide-open eyes. Though they were circling smoothly at last, carried on
by the slow, sweet music, so that they hardly seemed to be moving at
all, and though he did not really move his head, the boy's eyes seemed
to Judith to be coming nearer to hers, nearer all the time. They were
beautiful eyes, deep brown, and very clear. His brown hair grew in a
squarish line across his forehead, and waved softly at the temples. It
looked as if he had brushed it hard there to brush the curl out, but it
was curliest there.

"You've got the brownest eyes," said Judith.

"You've got the biggest eyes. Won't you tell me your name?"

Judith did not answer. She looked away from the disconcerting brown eyes
and down at her hand, against his shoulder, her own little hand, with
the careful manicure and the dull polish that was all her mother
permitted; bare of rings, though Norah had given her a beautiful garnet
ring for Christmas. How shiny his coat-sleeve was, and her hand looked
unfamiliar to her--not like her own at all. She pressed tighter against
his shoulder to steady herself.

The music was growing quicker and louder, working up gradually but
surely into a breathless crescendo that meant the end of the dance. It
whirled them dizzily about. The sleepy spell of the dance broke in this
final crash of noise, and as it broke a sudden panic caught Judith.

What had she been saying to this boy? She had never talked like this to
a boy before. And why was she dancing with him? She ought to be dancing
with Willard--Willard, waiting there in the dressing-room door with her
dance order in his hand, with the patient and puzzled look in his eyes,
with brick-red colour in his cheeks from the affront she had subjected
him to. What would Willard think of her? What would her mother think?
And who was this boy? Just what the children had called him in taunting
screams, on that long-ago May night, and she would have liked to scream
it now--a paddy.

Instead, she lifted her head, no longer afraid of the boy's brown eyes,
and said it, as cruelly as she could, in her soft and clear little
voice:

"Paddy," she said; "a paddy from Paddy Lane."

She looked defiantly into his eyes, but they did not grow angry. They
only grew very soft and kind, and they laughed at her. She wanted to
look away from the laughter in them, but she could not look away from
the kindness. Now she was not angry with him any more, but glad she was
dancing with him. She knew she never wanted to stop dancing.

"Paddy?" He thought she had said it to remind him of that May night; he
was remembering it now. "Are you that little girl?"

"Yes."

"The little girl who broke the lantern?"

"Yes," said Judith proudly.

"And had such long black legs, and went scuttling across the lawn, and
screaming out to me--that funny little girl?"

"But I did break the lantern," said Judith.

All the bravest stories that she had made up in the dark to put herself
to sleep with at night, all the perilous adventures of land and sea,
camp fire or pirate ship, began with the breaking of that lantern, and
the boy she rescued had been her companion upon them, her brushwood boy,
her own boy. She had found him at last, and he was laughing--laughing at
her.

"Sure you did. As if I couldn't have broken away from a bunch of fool
kids, without being doped with the smell of kerosene, and yelled at by
another fool kid. Sure you broke the lantern. How mad I was."

"You didn't remember." It was not a joke any longer now, but a tragedy,
and Judith felt overwhelmed by it, alone in the world. "You forgot, and
I--remembered."

The brown eyes and the gray met in one last long look and when the brown
eyes saw the hurt in Judith's, the laughter died out of them. Again they
seemed to be growing nearer and nearer to hers, but this time Judith was
not afraid, she was glad.

"If you didn't save my life then, you did to-night." It came in a husky
burst of confidence, straight from his shy boy's heart, very rare and
very precious. Judith caught her breath.

"Oh, did I? Did I?"

"Yes. This crowd here had me mad--crazy mad. I was going home. I was
going to get off the team. I wasn't going to school next week, and I've
worked my hands off to get there. Maybe you remembered and I forgot,
but--I won't forget again. You were that little girl." It was not a
slight to the little girl she used to be, but a tribute to the girl she
was; that was what looked out of his brown eyes at Judith, and sang
through the brogue in his voice.

"You were that little girl--you!"

"Yes," breathed Judith; "yes!"

They whirled faster and faster. This was really the end of the dance,
and this dance could never come again. Judith held tight to his shiny
shoulder, breathless, hurrying to part with her secret and strip herself
bare of mystery generously in a breath. All sorts of barriers might come
between them, she might put them there herself, and she was quite aware
of it, but not yet, not until the music stopped.

"My name's Judith--Judith Randall. Call me Judy."




CHAPTER FIVE


Colonel Everard sat at the head of his dinner table. A little dinner for
twelve was well under way at the Birches. Mrs. Everard was confined to
her tower suite to-night with one of the sudden headaches which unkind
critics held were likely to come when the Colonel entertained. Randolph
Sebastian, his secretary, had superintended the arrangements for the
dinner.

Pink roses, rather too many of them, were massed on the big, round
table. Rather too much polished silver was to be seen on it; the most
ornate candlesticks in the Everard collection, and a too complete array
of small, scattered objects, each with a possible but not an essential
function, littering a cloth already complicated by elaborate inserts of
lace. But the brilliantly lighted, over-decorated table was effective
enough in the big, darkly wainscoted room, a little island of light and
colour.

The room was characterless, but finely and generously proportioned, and
not so blatantly new as the rest of the colonel's house still looked.
Against the dark walls the pale-coloured gowns around the table were
charming. Indeed, most of the gowns were designed for this setting.

For there were no outsiders among the Colonel's guests to-night.
Sometimes there were distinguished outsiders, politicians and other big
men, diverted from triumphant tours through larger centres by the
Colonel's influence, and by his courtesy exhibited to Green River after
they had dined, or bigger men still, whose comings and goings the public
press was not permitted to chronicle. Sometimes, too, there were
outsiders on probation, the outer fringe of Green River society,
admitted to formal functions, and hoping in vain to penetrate to
intimate ones; ladies flustered and flattered, gentlemen sulky but
flattered, conscious that each appearance here might be their last, and
trying to seem indifferent to the fact.

But this was the Colonel's inner circle, gathered by telephone at
twenty-four hours' notice, as they so often were. No course that the
chef had contributed to the rather too elaborate menu was new to them.
The Pol Roger which the big English butler was just starting on his
second round was of the vintage year usually to be found on the
Colonel's wine list, and on most intelligently supervised wine lists. A
dinner for twelve, like plenty of little dinners elsewhere, no more
correct and no less, but it had this to distinguish it; it was being
served in Green River.

Served complete from hors-d'oeuvres to liqueurs, in a New England town
where high tea had been the fashion not ten years ago, and church
suppers were still important occasions--where you were rich on five
thousand a year, and there were not a dozen capitalists secure of so
much, where a second maid was an object of pride, and there was no
butler except the Colonel's. And he had imported this butler and his
chef and his wines, but not his guests; they were quite as impressive,
quite able to appreciate his hospitality, if not to return it in kind,
and they were all but one native products of Green River.

The youngest guest was eating mushrooms _sous cloche_ in contented
silence at the Colonel's left. The scene was not new to her. She could
not remember her first party here; she was probably the only person in
Green River who could pass over that momentous occasion so lightly. She
had grown up as the only child in the inner circle. She had been
privileged to excuse herself, when the formal succession of courses at
some holiday function was too much for her, and read fairy tales on a
cushion by the library fire, out of the fat, purple edition de luxe of
the "Arabian Nights" that was always waiting for her there. Though her
white ruffled skirts had grown long now, and her silvery gold braids
were pinned up, and she was allowed to fill an empty place at the
Colonel's table whenever he asked her, if not quite on his regular
dinner list yet, Judith was not much changed from that wide-eyed child,
and to-night her eyes looked sleepy and soft, as if she had serious
thoughts of the cushion by the fire and the fairy book still.

The scene was not new, but it kept a fascination for her, like a
transformation scene in a pantomime. Mr. J. Cleveland Kent, the manager
of the shoe factory, who had taken her in to dinner, had been leaning
out of a factory window in his shirt-sleeves, his black hair tumbled,
and badly in need of a shave, when she passed on her way home from
school. He looked mysterious and interesting in a dinner coat, like her
idea of an Italian nobleman.

When Judith knocked at the kitchen door to deliver a note, Mrs. Theodore
Burr, in a pink cooking apron, corsetless, and with her beautiful yellow
hair in patent curlers, had been blackening the kitchen stove, and
quarrelling with the furnace man about an overcharge of fifty cents on
his monthly bill. The Burrs had no maid. Theodore Burr had been
assisting Judge Saxon ever since he passed his bar examinations, but he
was not admitted to partnership yet. This was beginning to make gossip,
for he worked hard. He had broken his dinner engagement to-night, as he
often did, to stay at home and work. Randolph Sebastian, the secretary,
with the queer, hybrid foreign name, and thin face and ingratiating
brown eyes, had his place at the table.

Mrs. Burr, stately and slender now in jetted black, the lowest cut gown
in the room, her yellow hair fluffing and flaring into an unbelievable
number of well-filled-out puffs, was chattering to the Colonel in a low
voice, so that Judith could not understand, and breaking into French at
intervals--Green River High School French, but she spoke it with an air,
narrowing her blue-gray eyes after an alluring fashion she had and
laughing her full-toned laugh. She was a full-blown, emphatic creature,
though she had been married only three years, and was Lil Gaynor still
to half the town.

Auburn-haired little Mrs. Kent had been lying down all the afternoon, as
her disapproving domestic had informed any one who inquired at the door
in a shrill voice that did not promote repose. She was very piquant and
enticing now, with her bright, slanting hazel eyes, and a contagious
laugh, but her dinner partner, Judith's father, was tired and hard to
amuse. He looked very boyish when he was tired; his blue eyes looked
large and pathetic.

The other two young women and Judith's mother, whose dark, low-browed
Madonna beauty was gracious and fresh to-night, set off by her
clear-blue gown, with a gardenia caught in her sheer, white scarf,
deserved the Honourable Joseph Grant's flowery name for them, the Three
Graces.

Before the Colonel's time and Judith's the Honourable Joe had been the
most important man in Green River, and in evening things, and after a
properly concocted cocktail he still looked it, florid and portly and
well set-up, with a big voice that could still sound hearty though it
rang rather empty and hollow sometimes. He looked ten years younger than
his old friend, Judge Saxon. The Judge's coat was getting shiny at the
seams, and--this appeared even more unfortunate to Judith--he was in the
habit of pointing out that it was shiny, and without embarrassment. Mrs.
Saxon's pearl-gray satin was of excellent quality, but of last year's
cut, and the modest neck was filled in with the net guimpe which she
affected at informal dinners. The Saxons were not quite in the picture,
but they were always very kind to Judith.

And if they were not in the picture, Mrs. Joseph Grant, certainly not
the youngest woman in the room, though she was not the oldest, occupied
the centre of it.

She was like the picture of the beautiful princess on the hill of glass,
in a book of Judith's, and besides, she had once been a real débutante,
of the kind that Judith liked to read about in novels, before the
Honourable Joe brought her from Boston to Green River. Judith liked to
look at her better than any one here except Colonel Everard.

"Cosmopolitan--ten years ahead of Wells, or any town in your state; real
give and take in the table talk; really pretty women; the same little
group of people rubbing wits against each other day after day and
getting them sharpened instead of dulled by it; a concentrated, pocket
edition of a social life, but complete--nothing provincial about it," a
very distinguished outsider had said after his last week-end with the
Colonel.

But he was fresh from a visit to the state capital, the most provincial
city in the state when the legislature was not in session; also he had a
known weakness for pretty women. Green River did not admire the
Colonel's circle so unreservedly, but Green River was jealous. Whatever
you thought of it, it was made of fixed and unpromising material, and
making it was no mean achievement, and the man at the head of the table
looked capable of it, and of bigger things.

The Colonel was a big man and a public character, and as with many
bigger men, you could divide the facts of his life into two classes:
what everybody knew and what nobody knew. If the known facts were not
the most dramatic ones, they were dramatic enough. He was sixty now. At
fifteen he had been a student in a small theological seminary, working
for his board on his uncle's farm, and engaged to the teacher of the
district school, who helped him with his Greek at night. He gave up the
ministry for the law, used his law practice as a stepping-stone into
state politics, climbed gradually into national politics, built up a
fortune somehow--these were the days of big graft--married for money and
got an assured position in Washington society thrown in, and soon after
his marriage chose Green River as a basis of operations, spending a
winter month in Washington which later lengthened to three, ostensibly
for the sake of his wife's health. The title of Colonel came from
serving on the Governor's staff in an uneventful year. He had held no
very important office, but his importance to his party in state and
national politics was not to be measured by that.

White haired, slightly built, managing with perfectly apparent tricks
of carriage and dress to look taller than he was, he was the effective
figure in this rather unusually good-looking group of people. Just now
he was lighting a fresh cigarette for Mrs. Burr so gracefully that even
Judge Saxon must enjoy watching, so Judith thought, though there was a
tradition that he did not like women to smoke. Shocking the Judge was
one of their favourite games here. It was only a game. Of course they
could never shock anybody. They were quite harmless people, too grown up
to be very interesting, but almost always kind, and always gay.

The Colonel's profile was really beautiful through the curling, bluish
smoke, and Judith liked his quick, flashing smile. He turned now and
smiled at Judith. Her own smile was charming, a faint, half smile, that
never knew whether to turn into a real smile or to go away and not come
again, but was always just on the point of deciding.

"Is our débutante bored?"

"Oh, no; I was just thinking. No."

"She's blushing. Look at her."

"Yes, look at a real one. Do you good, Lil," agreed the Judge, and Mrs.
Burr rubbed a pink cheek with her table napkin, exhibited it daintily,
and laughed.

"Rose-white youth! But she doth protest too much." The Honourable Joe
was fond of quotations, and often tried to make his remarks sound like
them, when he could not recall appropriate ones, raising a solemn fat
finger to emphasize them: "The thoughts of youth are long, long
thoughts."

"Wrong, wrong thoughts," supplied Randolph Sebastian, so gravely that
the Honourable Joe accepted the amendment, and looked worried, as only
the thought of losing his grip on Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations" could
worry him at the end of a perfect meal.

"Wrong thought?" he repeated, in a puzzled voice.

"Thinking's barred here. What's the penalty, Judge?"

"You aren't likely to get it inflicted on you, so I won't tell you,
Lil."

"No, I don't think; I act," Mrs. Burr admitted cheerfully. She always
became a shade more cheerful just when you expected her to lose her
temper.

"How true that is," observed Mr. Sebastian gently.

"Ranny!"

"Didn't you play auction with me last night? We're out just----"

"Don't tell me. I can't think in anything beyond three figures. Ted's
doing higher mathematics over it. That's why he's home, really. I'll
play with you again to-night, for your sins."

"For my sins!" He made melancholy eyes, as if he were really confessing
them. Mr. Sebastian always pretended a deep devotion to Mrs. Burr.
Judith thought it was one of the silliest of their games.

"But what was Judy thinking about?" demanded Mrs. Grant, in the sweet,
indifferent voice that always made itself heard.

"She met a fairy prince at the ball last night. They are still to be
met--at balls."

"You'd meet one anywhere he made a date, wouldn't you, Edith Kent?" said
the Judge rudely. "Give Miss Judy a penny for her thoughts, if you want
them, Everard. You've got to pay sometimes, you know--even you."

"Don't commercialize her too young," said Mr. Sebastian smoothly.
"Though, on the whole--can you commercialize them too young?"

"Judith, what were you thinking about?" the Colonel interrupted, rather
quickly, turning every one's eyes upon her at once, as he could with a
word.

Judith met them confidently--amused, curious eyes, but all friendly and
gay. They talked a great deal of nonsense here, but it did not irritate
her, as it did her friend Judge Saxon, though she was not always amused,
and could not always understand. They never tried to shock her. She was
sorry for the Judge. He was not at home with these gay and good-natured
people, and it was so easy to be.

She tipped her head backward in deliberate imitation of Edith Kent, whom
she admired, half closed her eyes, like Lillian Burr, whom she admired
still more, gazed up at the Colonel, and said, in her clear little
voice:

"I was thinking about you."

"That's the answer," said Mr. Kent, and rewarded it with a lump of sugar
dipped in his apricot brandy.

"For an ingénue?" said Mrs. Burr, very sweetly indeed.

"'She's getting older every day,'" hummed Mrs. Kent, in her charming,
throaty contralto.

But Judge Saxon pushed back his chair and rose abruptly.

"I've had dinner enough," he said, "and so have you, Miss Judy."

"We all have, Hugh," said the Colonel quickly, and rose, too, and
slipped an intimate hand through his arm. "Run along, children! Hugh,
about that Brady matter----"

Judge Saxon submitted sulkily, but was laughing companionably with the
Colonel by the time they all reached the library.

Judith never admired the Colonel more than when he was managing Judge
Saxon in a sulky mood. And she never admired the Colonel and his friends
more than she did in the lazy intimate hour here before the cards began.

The room was long and high, and too narrow; unfriendly, as only a room
that is both badly proportioned and unusually large can be, but you
forgot this in the softening glow of candles and rose-shaded lights. You
forgot, too, that you were an exile from your own generation, among
elders who bored you, though you were subtly flattered to be among them.
Safe on a high window-bench in the most remote window, entirely your
own, since the architect had not designed it to be sat on, and nobody
else took the trouble to climb up, it was so much pleasanter to watch
these people than to talk to them; they had such pretty clothes, and
wore them so well, and made such effective, changing pictures of
themselves in the big room.

Sometimes they amused themselves with the parlour tricks that they had
so many of, and sometimes they drifted in and out in groups of two and
three, to more intimate parts of the house: the smoking-room, or Mrs.
Everard's suite, if she was well, or out through the French windows,
across the broad, glassed-in veranda that ran the length of the room and
darkened it unpleasantly by day, into the Colonel's rose garden. It was
warm enough for that to-night, and a yellow, September moon showed
invitingly through the windows. Mrs. Grant, who liked to be alone, as
Judith could quite understand, since she had to listen to the Honourable
Joe's big voice so much of the time, was slipping out through a window
now, taking the coat that Mr. Sebastian brought her, but refusing to let
him go with her.

He went to the piano, ran his thin, flexible brown fingers over the
keys, struck into a Spanish serenade, and sang a verse of it in his
brilliant but tricky tenor, with his languishing eyes upon Mrs. Burr.

"Ranny, do you want to tell the whole world of our love? You terrify
me," she said, and took refuge on one arm of the Colonel's chair.
Judith's mother, protesting that she needed a chaperon, promptly took
possession of the other arm, disposing her blue, trailing skirts
demurely, and looking more Madonna-like than ever through the cloudy
smoke of a belated cigarette. The others made themselves equally
comfortable, all but Judge Saxon, who had ceased to advertise the fact
that he was not.

"Smile at me," Mrs. Kent begged, hovering over his chair; "I'm going to
sing by and by, and I need it. Do smile! If you don't, I'm going to kiss
you, Judge."

"Go as far as you like, but be sure how far you like to go, Edith," said
the Judge quietly. She flushed, and turned away abruptly, playing with a
pile of songs.

"I'm looking for a lullaby. Our youngest seems to need it."

"Not in your line, are they?" said Sebastian, and began to improvise
one, while Judith, in her corner, closed her eyes contentedly. Whether
there was any truth or not in the report that he had been playing a
ramshackle piano in an East Side restaurant in New York when the Colonel
picked him up, Sebastian could do charming things with quite simple
little tunes, if you did not inquire into problems of harmony and
counterpoint too closely. He was doing them now, weaving odds and ends
of familiar tunes, rather scapegrace and thin, into a lovely, reassuring
whole, that made you feel rested and safe. Judith, making herself
comfortable against a stiff and unwieldy Arts and Crafts sort of
cushion, as long experience had taught her to, listened, smiling.

She had no idea what a unique position she was occupying there. Judge
Saxon grumbled and scolded, but he was part of the group in the room.
He had grown into it, and belonged to them, as he might have belonged to
an uncongenial family. The Colonel's distinguished guests saw them only
on their best behaviour. Their local critics never penetrated here at
all. Judith was the only outsider who did, and she had besides the
irrevocable right of youth to pronounce judgment upon those who have
prepared the world for it to occupy. She was their only licensed critic.
What did she think of them? Her blond head drooped sleepily. She did not
look disposed to say.

Sebastian played on, drifting into something sophisticated, with a
suggestion of waltz rhythms running through it. There was a stir of
movement in the room, and the sound of windows opening and shutting,
once, and then again. Judith did not turn her head to see who had gone
out. She was too comfortable. It was strange that he could make you so
comfortable with his music, when he made you so uncomfortable if you
talked to him, watching you so closely with his queer, bright eyes.

He stopped abruptly, with a big, crashing discord, and Judith rubbed her
eyes and sat up. Mrs. Kent was going to sing now. She tossed some music
to him.

"That's over your head," she said; "over all your heads; better put me
up there, too, Cleve. Besides, I want to dance. That table will do."
She cleared it unceremoniously, with her husband's help, and established
herself there, poised motionless, through the introductory bars of the
song, her sleepy eyes wide awake now, and a red rose from a bowl on the
table caught between her teeth.

Quietly, always careful to avoid the reputation of being shocked, like
the Judge, Judith slipped down from her perch, and across the room, and
out through the window.

    "Please keep my folks from kickin';
    Grab me while I'm a chicken,
    I'm getting older every day."

Mrs. Kent's fresh voice was urging, as Judith tiptoed across the
veranda.

The rowdy words of her little songs and the demure plaintiveness of Mrs.
Kent's voice made an effective contrast. It amused Judith as much as any
one, and she liked to laugh, but she liked better to cry, and if you
could not hear the words, Mrs. Kent's voice made you cry; big, luxurious
tears, that stood in your eyes and did not fall. As she found her way
across the lawn, among the elaborate flower-beds, the voice followed
her, mellow and sweet. It had never sounded so sweet before. Everything
sweet in the world was sweeter to-night.

At the edge of the lawn Judith paused. Ahead of her three marble steps,
flanked by urns filled with ivy, glaring things in the daytime but
glimmering shadowy white and alluring now, led up the terrace to the
rose garden; a fairy place, far from the world, so hedged in and
shadowed by trees that it was dark even by moonlight, entered through an
old-fashioned trellised arbour, that was so mysterious and dark, she
liked it almost as well now when the rambler roses were not in flower.

When she left the room her mother had been sitting in Colonel Everard's
chair, she seemed to remember, and the Colonel and Mrs. Burr were
nowhere to be seen. The whole room looked emptier, though she did not
know who else was missing. But there were two people now in the rose
arbour. She could just hear their voices, low, with long silences
between.

She wanted the place to herself. She stood still, hoping that they would
go. There was a path into the woods on the other side of the little
garden: the Colonel's bare, semicultivated woods, combed clean of
underbrush, but you did not miss it at night. The woods were full of
adventure, but the garden was better to dream in, and Judith had a great
deal to dream about.

The lighted house looked quite small and far away across the wide,
moonlit lawn. They had stopped singing, and the laughter that followed
the song did not sound so clear as the music; you could just hear it.
Presently you could hear nothing, and it was quiet in the rose arbour,
too. She waited until she was sure, standing quite still at the edge of
the dark enclosure, not a ruffle of her white dress fluttering, very
slender and small against the dark of the leaves. Then she slipped into
the arbour.

Through a fringe of drooping vine that half hid the picture, she could
see the garden, empty and dimly moonlit, with the marble benches faintly
white. She hurried through, pushed a trailing vine aside, then dropped
it and shrank back under the trellis.

The garden was empty. But across it, just at the entrance of the wood
path, she saw a man and a woman. At first she took the two figures for
one, they were standing so closely embraced. She could not see their
faces, only the two dark figures standing there like one. They stood
still a long time. They might have been lovers in a picture, only you
could not paint pictures of darkly clothed, ungraceful, shapeless
people. Finally they moved, the man turning suddenly, slipping an arm
higher around the woman's shoulders, and putting his face down to hers.

Then he drew her into the wood path, and they passed down it out of
sight. Judith did not know who the woman was, but the man was Colonel
Everard. And they had kissed each other.

Now they were gone. Judith drew a deep breath of relief and stepped out
into the enclosure, pacing across it with slow steps, possessing it for
her own and dismissing alien presences. There was a high-backed marble
erection between the benches, which looked like a memorial to the dear
departed, but was designed for a chair. She seated herself there
deliberately, leaning back, at ease somehow in the unfriendly depths of
it, a slender, uncompromising creature, like a young princess sitting in
judgment on her throne.

They had kissed each other. She knew they did things like this, but now
she had seen it, which was different, and not very pleasant. But they
were all so old. Did it really matter whether they kissed each other or
not?

"Stupid old things," said Colonel Everard's only authorized critic, "I
don't care what they do."

Here in the quiet of the garden you were free to think about more
interesting things than the Everards or even fairy princes.

"Stupid," repeated Judith absently, and forgot the Everards. The moon,
far away but very clear, shone down at her in an unwinking,
concentrated way, as if it were shining into the Colonel's garden and
nowhere else, and at nobody but Judith. She did not look disconcerted by
the attention, but stared back at it with eyes that were not sleepy now,
but very big and bright--wondering, but not afraid.

On still nights like this you could just hear the church clock strike
from the garden, but you could not count all the strokes. Judith
listened for the sound. It was early, and out here, in the cool, still
air, it felt early, though the time had passed so slowly in the
Colonel's sleepy rooms. She could hear no music from the house. They
would soon begin to put out the bridge tables. There was always a chance
that they would need her to complete a table, but if they did not, the
Colonel's car was to take her home at nine.

And the Colonel's youngest guest had further plans for the evening.




CHAPTER SIX


"That will be all, Miss?"

"Yes," said Judith, with unnecessary emphasis. "Oh, yes, indeed!"

The Everards' car turned and flashed out of the drive and up the street.
Judith stood still on the steps and watched it, if a young lady with her
breath coming fast and her eyes shining bright in the dark, and her
heart beating unaccountably hard can be said to be standing still. One
light burned forlornly over the entrance of the inn. Light was Judge
Saxon's one extravagance, and plenty of it was waiting for him in the
house next door, though it would be two before any one left the
Everards' but Judith.

The house before her was dark, and the dimly lighted street was
profoundly still, with the heavy and brooding stillness that comes upon
village streets after nine and is to be found nowhere else in the world.
Judith did not seem depressed by it. Somewhere on a side street solitary
footsteps echoed hollow through the silence, and she listened intently,
but they came no nearer, and presently died away. She fumbled excitedly
with her key, threw open the door, and groped her way across the
unlighted hall. She encountered the telephone table prematurely,
clutched it, and laughed a high-keyed, strange little laugh.

"Who's there?" demanded a voice from the stairs, disconcertingly close.
The lights, switched suddenly on, flashed into Judith's eyes, and Norah
confronted her, peculiarly forbidding in a discarded cape of Judith's
and her own beflowered best hat.

"Oh, it's you," she said.

"Who did you expect? Anybody else? Did--anybody come?"

"I expected you a half hour ago."

"What made you wait for me?"

"Didn't you want me to?"

"Nana, of course, but if your sister is sick and needs you----"

Norah listened to this irreproachable sentiment suspiciously. "It's late
to go," she said.

"I'll walk up with you if you're frightened."

"You! Can you unhook that dress?"

"Yes. I'm going to bed pretty soon. I'm awfully sleepy."

"There's some ginger ale on the ice."

"I can get it open myself. Did anybody come?"

"A boy you know."

"Who?"

"You're too anxious to know, and too anxious to get rid of me.
And you're acting nervous."

"I'm not. I'm just sleepy."

Norah, her grimmest self, as she always was just before relenting, began
to fumble with her hat-pins.

"Let me help, if you really want to take off your hat. You'll spoil your
beautiful roses. Darling, you look like your niece, the lovely Miss
Maggie Brady, in that hat. Don't take it off. You're cross because you
know where I've been. Well, they didn't eat me. I'm all here. It was
Willard who came, and I don't care whether you tell me or not. And I
don't want to get rid of you. And I love you and you love me, and you're
not cross now."

"If I love you, you've got need of it, then." Norah struggled
perfunctorily, and permitted herself to be kissed. "Alone here till all
hours of the night, and Mollie at the dance at the Falls, and your own
mother----"

"But you won't worry about me? And you'll go? And you'll go now, before
it gets later, so you won't be frightened. You'll go this minute?
And--oh, Nana----"

Norah, departing by the front door because the back one was secured by
an elaborate system of locks of her own invention, and operated only by
herself, turned to give Judith a farewell glance of grim adoration.

"Nana, was it Willard that came?"

"Yes."

"And not--anybody else?"

"No."

Norah, winding herself tightly into the cape in a way that converted
that traditionally graceful garment into a kind of armour, disappeared
up the street. When she was out of sight, and not until then, Judith
slammed the door shut, laughing her tense, excited laugh again.

Then, for a sleepy young woman, she began to display surprising
activity. First she turned off all the lights in the hall but one, in an
opalescent globe, over the front door, looked at the faintly lighted
vestibule with a calculating eye, and turned that out also. She looked
critically in at the library, close curtained for the night, and dimly
lit by the embers of the wood fire, raked apart, but not dead. She
pushed them together expertly, and added a stick, a little one, which
would soon burn down to picturesque embers, like the rest. She pulled an
armchair closer to the fire, pushed it away again, and dropped two
cushions on the hearth with a discreet space between.

The remains of Willard's last half-dozen carnations and a box of the
eighty-cent-a-pound candy which only Mr. Edward Ward was extravagant
enough to prefer to the generally popular fifty-cent Belle Isle, were
conspicuous on the table, and Judith carried them into the next room,
out of sight. Just then the telephone rang.

Judith started, dropped the candy, ran into the hall, and stood looking
down at the small instrument resentfully, as if it were personally to
blame because she could not see who was calling her without answering
and committing herself. Once she picked it up doubtfully, but finally
put it down, still ringing intermittently, and hurried into the kitchen.
She put a second bottle of ginger ale on the ice, brought a hammered
brass tray and two glasses from the butler's pantry, then substituted a
less ostentatious bamboo tray, hesitated, and then put them all away
again.

Now she went to her own room, turned on an unbecoming but searchingly
clear toplight, and frowned at herself in the mirror, jerked out her
hairpins, shook out her soft hair, and brushed and pulled at it with
unsteady hands. In spite of them, the pale gold braids, rearranged,
looked almost as well as before, if no better, and the heightened colour
in her cheeks was charming. From a corner of her glove-case she produced
the two cosmetics then in favour with the younger set in Green River,
burnt matches, and a bit of scarlet ribbon, which made an excellent
substitute for rouge if you moistened it. The ribbon was an unhealthy
red, and looked peculiarly so to-night. Judith dropped it impulsively
into her wastebasket, but experimented with the matches.

She made both her delicately shaded eyebrows an even splotchy black,
admired the result, then suddenly rubbed it off, turned away from the
mirror without a backward glance, and ran down into the hall. The clock
was just striking ten.

Judith paused for one breathless minute at the library door, pressing
both hands against her heart, then she went into the firelit room and
made the last and most important of her preparations. She switched on
the lights, toplights and sidelights and reading-lamp, all of them, went
to the middle one of the three front windows, crushed the curtains back,
and raised both shades high to the top, so that the light in the room
looked out at the street from this window from sill to ceiling. Judith
slipped quickly out of range of the window, dropped down on one of the
cushions by the fire, and waited.

She had fluttered through her little hurry of preparation excitedly, but
now there was evidence of deeper excitement about the tense quiet of
her, huddled on her cushion, small hands clasping silken knees, and
brooding eyes on the fire. There was a dignity about her, too, in spite
of her childish pose and a drooping grace that was almost a woman's.

What she was waiting for was slow to come, but she did not seem
disturbed by that. The hands of the clock above her seemed to move with
the unbelievable quickness characteristic of clock hands when there is
no other activity in the room, and she observed them calmly. Soon they
pointed to the quarter hour, they passed it. She looked faintly worried
then. The telephone rang again; she pressed her hands over her ears and
shut her eyes tight, and did not answer. The stick on the fire burned
low and she did not replace it. It parted and fell from the andirons
with a dull noise that echoed loudly through the empty room. Judith
started and jumped up, her eyes hard and bright, her hands tightly
clenched.

She eyed the clock threateningly, as if it were personally responsible
for whatever disappointment she might be feeling, and she were daring it
not to strike. It struck half-past ten in spite of her. Judith's mouth
trembled childishly, and tears started to her eyes. They did not fall.
Footsteps sounded outside. They turned into the drive. Judith stood on
tiptoe and peeped at herself in the mantel mirror--her flushed cheeks,
tumbled hair, and sparkling eyes. The steps crossed the porch, and she
ran to the door and threw it open--the length of the chain, and no
wider. She did not unbar the chain. On the threshold, with a substantial
box of Belle Isle under his arm, stood Mr. Willard Nash.

Judith regarded Mr. Nash and his Belle Isle with disfavour.

"You can't come in," she said.

Mr. Nash, who had been stooping to flick some dust from his boots,
straightened guiltily. "Why?"

"It's too late."

"I've got to see you."

"You do see me." A white dress, a face almost as white, and big, dark
eyes were all he could see, but it seemed to be enough. He inserted a
square-toed boot cautiously in the opening of the door.

"I want to see you _about_ something."

"What?"

"A new comic song for the quartette. They won't let us do 'Amos Moss' at
the Lyceum concert. That part about the red shirt is vulgar. The new
one's close harmony. It will show off Murph's voice."

"It's too late now. Go home, Willard."

"But I brought you this."

"Go home and eat it," suggested Judith.

Willard turned scarlet, swung round, then changed his mind and inserted
his foot in the crack of the door again, this time with a purposeful
air. He was to develop into the type of man to whom an unpropitious time
and place are an irresistible temptation to demand a show-down. It is a
type that goes far, though it is not essentially popular. Judith sighed,
then resigned herself.

"Judy, I don't make you out."

"You don't have to."

"I do." Willard's voice was impressive, as even a fat boy's can be when
he is in the grip of fate and conscious of it. "I do."

"I'm sorry, Willard, dear," murmured Judith, with disarming sweetness,
but he was not to be turned from his purpose.

"Judy, are you going with me or not?"

"Going with you?"

"Don't be a snob. What else can I call it but going with me? I don't
know any other way to say it."

"Then don't say it."

"You've got my class pin and I've got yours. I know there isn't anybody
else. You let me call and take you places, but you won't let me----"

"What?"

Willard looked sheepishly down at his boots, then bravely up at Judith.
"Put my arm round you at picnics. Kiss you good-night."

Judith cut short this catalogue crisply.

"Spoon?"

This word was forbidden in the upper circles of the Green River younger
set, and Willard looked pained, but collected himself.

"We are the same as engaged," he insisted sturdily.

He had forced an issue at last, but Judith evaded it, laughing softly in
the dark.

"Oh, are we?"

"Aren't we?"

"How do you know there isn't anybody else?"

"Well, you won't look at Ed, and Murph don't count." Willard made this
pronouncement lightly, though the adamantine rules and impassable
barriers of a whole social order were embodied in it. "Murph that you're
so thick with, all of a sudden. He's a bully fellow, all right, next
captain of the team, probably. Good thing he's broken into the crowd a
little way. Too bad he's Irish. Murph don't count."

"No--no!" A sudden and poignant sweetness thrilled in Judith's voice.
The tenor of the Green River High School quartette, not ordinarily
sensitive to variations of tone in the voices of others, could not
ignore it. The change had disturbed him vaguely. It seemed to call for
some comment.

"Judy, you look great to-night.... I'd do anything for you."

"Then go home, Willard."

"You haven't answered my question."

"What question?"

"Don't tease."

"I honestly don't know."

"You don't hear one word I'm saying to you."

Judith laughed guiltily. "Then what makes you talk to me?"

"Judith--are we the same as engaged?"

Judith hesitated. "Kissing each other good-night--and all that--is
silly. I don't want to. Only sometimes I want to, and then afterward I'm
ashamed, and can't understand why. Willard, I don't want to grow up. I
don't ever want to. I want things to stay just the way they are. They
are--lovely. Oh, Willard----"

She stopped, with tears in her eyes. There had been a real appeal in his
earnest young voice, and she had done her best to answer it, painfully
thinking out loud, with her heart in her words, making him an authentic
confidence. But the confidence was off the point, and he ignored it,
pursuing his subject with the concentration which will keep his sex the
stronger one, votes for women or no votes for women.

"Are you the same as engaged to me?"

"Will you go home if I say I am?"

"Are you?"

"There isn't any such thing as being the same as engaged."

"Are you?"

"Yes."

Willard, forgetting himself in the heat of debate, had withdrawn his
foot from the door. Judith, narrowly on the watch for this moment, now
seized it, shutting him and his Belle Isle outside, and slamming the
door in his face. He had gained his point, and would not linger. She
heard him ring the bell once or twice in perfunctory protest, then put
down his candy on the steps.

"Good-night," he called cheerfully, through the flimsy barrier of the
pseudo-Colonial door.

"Good-night, Willard--dear!"

Judith's voice was sweet, but indifferent, and her manner was
indifferent, for a young lady who would have seemed, to a literal-minded
person, to have materially affected her whole future life by this
conversation. She did not watch Willard go. She turned and stood in the
library door, smiling absently and humming a little snatch of a waltz
tune. It was eleven now, but the hour had ceased to concern her, as if
she had been watching the clock for Willard. Presently, as if she
really had, she tossed the cushions back on the couch, drew the shades
over the window, turned off the lights, and disappeared upstairs.
Muffled sounds of a methodical but unhurried preparation for bed drifted
faintly down, one last ripple of song, and then it was silent there.

It was very still in the library. The stillness of the whole empty house
and the moonless night outside seemed to centre there. The dying fire
threw out little spurts of flame and made wavering shadows on the hearth
as if Judith were still crouching there. The embers glowed as red as
when she had been fire-gazing, but they did not show what it was she had
seen in the fire. They kept her secrets as safely as she kept them
herself; as youth must keep its secrets, inarticulate, dumb, because it
sees into the heart of the world so deeply that if it were granted
speech it would make the world too wise. What Judith had seen in the
fire, what had really been in her heart when she talked to Willard in
the groping and pitiful language of youth, the only language she had,
the fire could not tell, and perhaps Judith did not know.

It was still, and the tiniest sounds were exaggerated: a board creaking
at the head of the stairs, and creaking again, the stair-rail creaking,
the ghost of a faint little sigh; tiny and intermittent sounds, but the
silence became a listening hush because of them: listening harder and
harder. At last a sound broke it: the doorbell, rung three times, one
long peal and two short.

It was rung faintly, but loud enough. There was a soft hurry of
slippered feet down the stairs, and a slender figure, tall in
straight-falling draperies, slipped cautiously down and across the hall
to the door, stopped and stood leaning with one ear pressed against it,
silent and motionless, hardly breathing. The faint signal was repeated.
Judith did not move.

There was one more ring, a soft tapping, and then silence. Judith
listened for a minute, then whistled softly, a clear little signal, one
long and two short, like the signal ring. There was no answer. She
pulled frantically at the chain, got it loose, and threw open the door.

A boy was standing on the steps, a stolid, unmoving figure, looming
deceptively tall in the dark. He did not step forward or greet her.
Judith put out a groping hand and caught at his shoulder.

"Is it you? Oh, I thought you had gone," she said. "I was watching for
you upstairs."

"I am going. I can't come in so late."

"No, of course not."

"Then what made you watch for me?"

"I wanted to see if you came."

"Well, I did come, and now I'm going."

"You walked past the house five times."

"Eight." The boy laughed shortly, and Judith's soft laugh echoed his.
"Oh, what's the use? I'm going."

"Don't you want to come in?"

"No."

"Then what made you walk past the house?"

"You know well enough."

"I want you to tell me.... You can come in just five minutes if you want
to."

"I--you----"

Judith caught her trailing draperies tighter round her, conscious that
they were under observation. "It's not a kimono, it's a negligee. And
you've seen my hair in braids before, when I played basket-ball. But you
needn't come in unless you want to."

"I don't."

"You're not very nice to me. Willard tried to break in. Rena's been
trying to get me by 'phone, to stay all night with me. You're not nice
to me at all."

His only reply was a kind of tortured groan, but she seemed content with
it. Her voice grew compellingly sweet.

"I want to talk to you."

"Go on and talk."

She huddled her draperies closer. "I'm too cold."

"Go to bed then."

"I won't. If you don't come in I shall stand here till mother comes.
I'll probably get pneumonia."

This threat evoked no reply.

"Neil," the name was said as only names are said that are new and
dear--not often used yet, but often dreamed over, but there was still no
answer.

"Neil, I'm awfully cold."

"I don't care."

"Oh, don't you?"

"You know I do. You know---- Oh, Judith, won't you please let me go? I
don't want to come in, I tell you."

"But you're coming?"

"Yes."

Yielding abruptly, he stepped into the hall beside her. Judith, suddenly
silent, concerned herself conscientiously with the chain.

"Don't stand there like that. I can't fasten this if you do," she said
breathlessly.

"Why?"

"Go into the library, and don't light the lights, if you're afraid of
pigtails."

"I'm not afraid of--anything."

"Well--I'm not." With a reckless laugh, which made this comprehensive
challenge to the world still more comprehensive, she followed him into
the firelit room. Slender and straight in soft-falling white, her face
flushed and sweet, framed between silvery gold braids, her eyes wide and
challenging, she stood looking at him across the hearth.

He faced her awkwardly but bravely, tall in the shadowy room, his face
very white, his dark eyes catching the last rays of light from the dying
fire. The two did not move or speak till he gave a sudden, shaken laugh.

"You wanted to talk to me--talk." He smiled a quick flashing smile.
Judith drew away from him and he followed. "Now you've got me here,
can't you shake hands with me?"

"Neil, be careful."

"I'm doing the best I can," he said in a choked voice. "You shouldn't
get me here. You shouldn't get me to a house by night that's not open to
me by day."

"But it is. Only they'll never let me see you alone, and I like to. I
like to talk to you. It makes me feel--comfortable. Isn't it comfortable
here?" Judith paused, overcome by an unaccountable difficulty with her
breathing, but mastered it. "Comfortable and cozy? Aren't you glad you
came in?"

"Comfortable!" He laughed, came two steps nearer to her, and
stopped stiffly. Judith, disposing her soft, silky draperies daintily,
observed him in silence from a big chair which she had taken possession
of rather abruptly, faintly smiling.

"Don't look at me like that," he commanded.

"Like what? Sit down--over there, Neil. Isn't it cozy? Willard's got a
new song that----"

"Willard!"

"Don't be cross. We--haven't very much time."

"Judith, where is this getting us? We're not children. Won't you talk
straight to me? You ought to leave me alone, or talk straight."

"Please don't be cross."

"Cross!" He came across the hearth and stood close before her, awkward
no longer, but splendid with youth in the firelight, his dark eyes
shining.

"You knew I'd come, no matter how hard I tried not to?"

"Yes," Judith breathed.

"And you meant to let me in?"

"Oh, yes."

"And you know, if I come, if you let me, I can't help--can't help----"

"What?"

"Oh, Judith!" He dropped on his knees beside her and hid his face.
Judith did not touch the dark head that she could see dimly in the
shadowy room, outlined against her cloudy white, but she leaned closer
to it, her lips parting softly, her eyes wide and strange.

"I don't want you to help it," she breathed.

"But where will it get us?" pleaded a muffled voice.

"I don't care." Her hand hovered over the dark hair, touching it with
the wonderful, blended awkwardness and adroitness of first caresses.

He brushed the butterfly touch away and raised his head and looked long
at her, slipping both arms round her waist and holding her tight.

"Will you always say that?"

"I don't know."

"Oh, Judith!" Her sweet, flushed face was close above him now, eyes
drooping, lips faintly apart, drawn down to his as gently and inevitably
as tired eyes close into sleep. "Judith, some day you'll have to care."

"Not yet. Neil, don't talk any more."

"I--can't."

"Then kiss me."




CHAPTER SEVEN


It was winter in Green River.

The town, attracting Colonel Everard to it sixteen years before, newly
prosperous, outgrowing its old lumbering days, with the ship-building
industry already a thing of the past, with the power in the little river
awaiting development, money in the small but thriving bank, and a new
spirit everywhere, beyond the control of old leaders, too progressive
for a provincial magnate's direction, had been in the interesting and
dangerous condition of a woman ready for her next love affair; if the
right man comes, she may live happy ever after, but even if the wrong
man comes, a flirtation is due. Like a woman again, the town showed the
strength of his hold on her in his absence; in winter, when the big,
unfriendly house was shuttered and closed, the ladies of the inner
circle wore out their summer evening gowns at mild winter gayeties,
church socials, Village Improvement Society bridge parties, and the
old-fashioned supper parties which the Nashes and Larribees and Saxons
still ventured to give.

Humble festivities which he would not have honoured with his presence
lacked allurement because he was not in town and staying away from them.
Great matters and small hung fire to await his deciding vote, from the
list of books to be bought for the library to the chairmanship of the
school board. Marking time and waiting for the Colonel to come home;
that was what winter meant to most of Green River, but not to Judith
Randall. Winter was a charmed time to her; the time when her mother did
not care what she did. Freedom was always sweet, but this winter it was
sweeter than ever before to Judith.

She was never lonely now. Whispering groups in the dingy corridor of the
old schoolhouse, or in that sacred spot, the senior's corner, a cluster
of seats in the northwest corner of the assembly-room devoted by
tradition to secret conclaves, though not distinguishable from the rest
of the seats in the room to uninitiated eyes, drew her in without
question, slipping intimate arms round her waist.

Attempts at informal gatherings in the Randall drawing-room were
failures, chilled by brief but devastating invasions of Mrs. Randall
with a too polite manner and disapproving eyes. But wherever the crowd
drifted after school hours, Judith drifted, too, or was summoned by
telephone, by imperative messages, vague, and of infinite
possibilities:

"Judy, this is Ed. There'll be something doing to-night at our house.
Bring your new dance records." Or, as the outer fringe of the younger
set, jealously on the watch for snobbishness, but disarmed at last,
claimed her diffidently but eagerly, new names at which her mother
raised her eyebrows appeared on her dance orders: Joe Garland, whose
father kept the fish market, and Abie Stern, Junior, the tailor's son.
"Is this Judith Randall? Well, Judith, this is Joe; Joe Garland. I'm
getting up a crowd to go skating to-night, and have a rarebit afterward.
Would you care to come?"

She was one of the crowd. Natalie, little, sparkling-eyed, and
black-haired, with the freshest and readiest of laughs, was more
popular, filling her dance orders first and playing the lead in
theatricals, and Rena Drew was more prominent, president of the class
and the debating society, and the proud owner of the strongest voice in
the school quartette, a fine big contralto which wrapped itself round
Judith's small, clear soprano at public appearances and nearly
extinguished it. Willard, the most eligible of the boys, was Judith's
unquestioned property, otherwise nothing distinguished her. She was one
of the crowd, and accepted the fact demurely, as if it were a matter of
course, not a dream come true. Just as discreetly she conducted her
affair with Neil Donovan, captain-elect of the team, literary editor of
the school paper, star debater, and in his way a creditable conquest, if
she had cared to claim him openly.

"Neil danced three dances with me," confided Natalie, in the hushed
whisper appropriate to the confidences that were part of the ceremony of
spending the night together after a party, though Natalie's room, with
the old-fashioned feather bed, where the two were cuddling together, was
on the third story of the rambling white house, and safe out of hearing.

"Neil?"

"Judy, it's too bad to call him Murph and make fun of him. The day he
came into the store to solicit ads for the _Record_ father said that boy
would go far, if he had half a chance, but no boy had a chance in this
town, the way it is run, and no Irish boy ever did have a chance. Well,
an Irish boy is just as good as anybody, if they only thought so."

"But they don't."

"Judy, you are horrid about Neil. You always are about any boy I get
crushed on. Neil has perfectly beautiful eyes, and he is so sensitive.
He kept looking at you all through that last schottische as if you had
hurt his feelings. He must have gone home soon after that. I didn't see
him again. You didn't dance with him once."

"No."

"Poor boy. And he's up there in the schoolhouse with you, hour after
hour, practising quartette stuff, and Willard so crazy about you he
can't see, and Rena crazy about Willard----"

"Rena can have Willard."

Miss Ward was not to be diverted. "Neil's father did keep a saloon, but
he died when Neil was a baby. His uncle that he lives with keeps a store
at the Falls, and that's all right. His aunt took in washing, but his
mother never did. Charles Brady does get drunk, but Maggie drives him to
it. She's getting awfully wild. She's a perfect beauty, though, and I
wish I had her hair. But Charlie's only Neil's second cousin. And Neil
is so quiet and pleasant, not like that Brady boy that was in my sister
Lutie's crowd; just as fascinating, but Neil doesn't take liberties."

"I'm getting sleepy, Nat."

"Judy, the way I feel about Neil, about Irish boys, is this: we can't go
with them afterward, but while they're in school with us, they are just
as good as we are, and we ought to give them just as good a time as we
can. If you know what I mean."

"I don't. I'm sleepy."

"I'm not. I shan't shut my eyes." But Miss Ward did shut them. "Judy."

"Well?"

"Judy, Abraham Lincoln split rails."

"Cheer up. The Warren Worth Comedy Company is going to play at the Hall
next week, and Warren Worth has perfectly beautiful eyes, too."

"Not like Neil's."

"Go to sleep, Nat."

But Judith did not go to sleep until after an hour of staring wide-eyed
into the dark, and she did not confide to Natalie or any one what had
happened in the intermission after the schottische.

"You act restless," Willard complained to her then. "You hardly looked
at me all through the encore."

"I'll look at you now, but get me some water first," she directed, and
having disposed of him, slipped out alone into the dim and draughty
corridor. Odd Fellows' Building, the centre of various business
activities by day, looked deserted and forlorn at night, when the suites
of offices were dark and closed, and the hall where they danced, gayly
lighted and tenanted, was a little island of brightness in the
surrounding dark.

"Neil," Judith called softly, "Neil, where are you? I saw you come out
here. I know you're here." The corridor was empty, but several office
doors opened on it, and on one of them she saw Charlie Brady's name. She
knocked at it. "You're in there. I know you are. Let me in." She tried
the door, found it unlocked, and opened it. The room was dark, faintly
lighted by the street lamps outside the one uncurtained window, where he
sat with his head in his hands, huddled in a discouraged heap over
Charlie Brady's desk. Judith came and perched on it triumphantly.

"Running away?" she said.

"It's all I'm good for."

"Look at me."

"I thought you hadn't any dances free."

"I haven't. This is Willard's."

"Go back to Willard.... What did you come here for?"

"I don't know."

"Don't you?" He looked up now, with magic in his eyes and voice, the
strange magic that came and went, and when it left him Judith could
never believe it would come again. But it was here. With a little sigh
she slipped off the desk and into the arms he held out for her, closing
her eyes.

"I didn't want to dance with you," she whispered; "not with all those
lights, and before those people."

"No, dear."

"I can't stay very long. They'd miss me."

"I'll let you go when you want to."

"I don't want to. I feel so comfortable--all sleepy, but so wide-awake.
I never want to go."

Judith, remembering this moment until she carried it into her dreams
with her, could not have shared it with Natalie. It was a dream already,
to be wondered at and forgotten by daylight, as she stared across the
schoolroom at Neil, not a romantic figure at all with his ill-fitting
suit and his tumbled hair; forgotten until the next moment like it
came--next in a lengthening series of dream pictures, of moonlight and
candlelight and faintly heard music, a secret too sweet to share, a
hidden treasure of dreams.

Certain pictures stood out clearest. In one, she was skating with Neil.
Willard was giving a chowder party at the Hiawatha Club. This imposing
name belonged to a rough one-room camp with a kitchen in a lean-to and a
row of bunks in the loft above, and a giant chimney, with a crackling
blaze of fire to combat the bleakness of the view through the
uncurtained windows--Mirror Lake. It was a failure as a mirror that
day, veiled with snow, and the white birches fringing it showed bare and
cold among the warm green of spruce and pine.

The camp was built and owned and the canoes and iceboats kept in repair
in the boathouse, and the cook maintained and replaced when he left from
loneliness, all by a syndicate with Judge Saxon as president. Forming it
was one of the last independent social activities of the town before the
Colonel took charge.

It was bad ice-boating to-day. The wind was fitful, and the boat, a
graceful and winged thing in full flight, dragged heavily along, looking
the clumsy makeshift box of unpainted boards that it was. It was a day
to be towed along on your skates with one hand on the boat. Judith and
Neil had tired of this and fallen behind.

Close together, but not taking hands, they swung slowly through the
unpeopled emptiness, leaving a tiny scattering of tracks behind, the
blue-white ice firm under their feet through a light film of snow. The
ice-boat was out of sight, the sprightly and unexpurgated ballad of
"Amos Moss," rendered in the closest of close harmony, could be heard no
longer, and a heavy silence hung over the lake. The camp lay far behind
them, a vanishing speck.

"Neil, take me back," Judith directed suddenly.

"Not yet."

"Please. I want some pop-corn.... Neil, I don't like you. You won't
talk. You're queer to-day."

He did not answer. They cut through the ice in silence. It was rougher
here. They were near the north end of the lake. There was open water
there to-day, black water into which a boat might crash and go down; it
made the water under them seem nearer to Judith, black water with only
the floor of ice between. She shivered, and Neil broke the silence
abruptly, his eyes still straight ahead.

"Judith."

"Oh, you can talk then?"

"Judith--do you love me?"

"Don't be silly." Judith spoke sharply. Days at the camp were always a
trial to her. The crowd, bunched together in a big hay-rack mounted on
runners, started out noisy and gay, like a party of children, singing,
groping for apples in the straw, and playing children's games. But at
night, slipping home under the moon to a tinkle of sleigh-bells, covered
with rugs two by two, a change would take place: arms would slip around
waists that yielded after perfunctory protest; in the dark of the woods
there would be significant whispering and more significant silences;
Willard would be unmanageable. Judith saw this with alien eyes because
of Neil, and dreaded it. This that was between them was so much more
beautiful, not love-making, not real love, only a strange, white dream.

"You don't, then? You don't love me?"

"We're too young."

He did not argue the point. His silence had made her lonely before, now
it frightened her. She slipped a hand into his, warm through its clumsy
glove.

"Cross hands. Don't you want to?"

"No."

"But I want to. I'm tired. How limp your hand feels. Hold my hands
tighter. Neil----"

"What?"

"You don't mind--what I said just now?"

"What did you say?"

"That about not loving you."

"That?" He laughed a bitter, lonely sort of laugh, as if she were
talking about something that happened a long time ago. "You had to say
it. It's true. I knew it well enough. I just thought I'd ask you."

"Do you want me to very much--want me to love you?"

"Don't talk any more about it."

"Neil, suppose I should marry Willard?"

"I suppose you will."

"You won't mind too much?"

"What call would I have to mind? Who am I? What am I?"

He laughed again, the same hard and bitter laugh, and struck out faster,
gripping her hands hard, so that it hurt, but looking away from her
across the dead, even white of the trackless snow. There was a pain not
to be comforted or reached in his beautiful eyes. It had nothing to do
with her.

"Neil, wouldn't you care at all?" she said jealously.

"Care?"

"If I married Willard?"

"Oh, yes."

"Neil, do you love me?"

He did not answer or seem to hear, and now Judith gave up asking
questions. Carried along at his side in silence, she listened to the
muffled creak of the skates on the snow-covered ice, hushed by the
steady and sleepy sound of it, half closing her eyes. His left arm was
behind her shoulders now, to support her, and she could feel it there,
warm and strong. Breathing when he breathed, her heart beating in time
with his, swinging far to right and left, tense with the stroke or
yielding deliciously in the recovery, caught in the rhythm of it as if
some force outside them both were carrying them on like one, and not
two, and would never let them go, Judith yet felt far away from him.

She was alone in the heart of a snow-covered world, but she was growing
content to be alone. She looked up at his white, set face with wide and
fearless eyes, while the lure of unexplored and unseen ice invited them
all around, and the gray and brooding sky shut them in closer and
closer.

"Neil," she said softly, not caring now whether he answered or heard, "I
wish we needn't ever go back. I love to-day."

Not long after this Judith and Neil went snow-shoeing one Saturday
afternoon by special appointment, an epoch-making event for them. Judith
did not often walk with him or take him driving when the sleigh was
entrusted to her. She was not often seen with him. With quartette
practice and committee work for the dramatic club and other official
pretexts for the time they spent together, Willard was not jealous yet,
though the winter was almost over, and the treasury of dreams was
filling fast.

But this time she made an engagement with Neil as openly as if he were
Willard, while Natalie listened jealously. She started with him openly
from the front door, with her mother's disapproving eyes upon them from
the library window, and Neil proudly carrying her snowshoes, all
unconscious of the critical eyes. The afternoon began well, but no
afternoon with Neil could be counted upon to go as it began. Two hours
later, when they emerged from the Everard woods into the Colonel's
snow-covered rose garden, they had quarrelled about half a dozen
unrelated subjects, all equally unimportant in themselves, but suddenly
important to Neil, who now found further matter for debate.

"What did you bring me in here for?"

"Didn't you know I was?"

"How should I know? I'm no friend of Everard's. I don't know my way
through his grounds."

"What makes you call him Everard, without any Colonel or Mr.? It sounds
so--common."

"It's good enough for me. Here, I don't want to go near his house. I
hate the sight of it."

"But you can't go back by the path. It's too broken up." Judith plunged
into the dismantled rose arbour. "Come on, if you don't want to see the
house, take my hand and shut your eyes."

"That's what Green River does," Neil muttered darkly, "shuts its eyes."
But he followed her.

"The Red Etin's castle," Judith announced; "you know, in the fairy tale:

    "The Red Etin of Ireland,
        He lived in Ballygan.
    He stole King Malcolm's daughter,
        The pride of fair Scotlan'.
    'Tis said there's one predestinate
        To be his mortal foe----

Well, you talk as if the Colonel were the Red Etin, poor dear. Oh, Neil,
look!"

Sinister enough, looming turreted and tall against a background of
winter woods, its windows, unshuttered still, since the last of the
Colonel's week-end parties, and curtainless, catching the slanting rays
of the afternoon sun and glaring malignantly, the house confronted them
across the drifted lawn.

In the woods that circled the house, denuded of undergrowth, seeming
always to be edging forlornly closer to the upstanding edifice for
comfort because it was barren and unfriendly, too, the new-fallen snow
lay shadowy and soft, clothing the barrenness with grace. Giant pine and
spruce that had survived his invasion stood up proud and green under the
crown of snow that lay lightly upon them, as it had lain long ago,
before the Colonel came. And between woods and house, erasing all trace
of tortuous landscape gardening, flower-bed and border and path, as if
it had never been, lay a splendid, softly shining sweep of blue-white
snow. The Colonel's unbidden guests forgot their quarrel and plunged
eagerly across the white expanse.

"Catch me," Judith called, but it was Neil, snatching off her toboggan
cap by its impudent tassel, who had to be caught. It was heavy and
breath-taking work on the broad, old-fashioned snowshoes which she
managed with clumsy grace. Judith, short-skirted and trim in fleecy
white sweater, collar rolled high to the tips of small, pink ears, blond
curls blowing in the wind, pursued ardently. Neil evaded her like a lean
and darting shadow, hands deep in the pockets of his old gray sweater,
cap low over his brooding eyes.

Under the unrelenting glare of the Colonel's windows, and across the
deserted grandeur of his lawn, the two small and dishevelled figures
dodged and doubled and retreated, only to grapple and trip each other up
at last at the foot of the veranda steps, and collapse there, breathless
and laughing. But their laughter died quickly, and Judith, pulling the
recovered cap over her wind-tossed curls, watched the brooding gloom
come back into Neil's eyes as he settled into a sulky heap on the step
below her.

Her quarrels with Neil were as strange as her beautiful hours with him,
fed by black undercurrents of feeling that swept and surprised her,
flaming up suddenly like banked fires. She was hotly angry with him now.

"Neil, I heard what you said about Green River shutting its eyes. It was
foolish."

"I'd say it to his face." Neil flashed a black look at the bland and
elegant drawing-room windows, as if he could talk to the Colonel through
them. "I've got worse than that to say to Everard."

"Then say it to me. Don't hint. I'm tired of hearing you. You're as bad
as Norah."

"You wouldn't understand."

That is the irresistible challenge to any woman. Judith's eyes kindled.
Neil slouched lower on the steps, dropping his head in his hands.
"Everard," he threw out presently, "has bought the Hiawatha Club Camp."

"I don't believe it."

"The club was in debt. That's a bad thing for a club or a man to be, if
the Colonel knows it. And it's a worse thing for a woman."

"What do you mean?"

He did not explain or raise his head. "I've got a job for the summer
vacation," he said presently.

"Already? Fine."

"Oh, fine. In the fish market--tend store, drive the cart. And I'm fired
from the _Record_, Judith."

"Fired?"

"They're going to take on one more man, and pay him real money."

"But you've got the Green River Jottings to do for the Wells _Clarion_."

"And I may get two dollars a month out of it."

"Did you see Judge Saxon again?"

"Last week."

"Why didn't you tell me what he said?"

"I told you what he would say."

"Oh, Neil!"

"The Judge hates to say no, that's why he took time to think it over.
He'd be a bigger man if he didn't hate to say no. He was right to say no
to me."

"Then I wouldn't admit it."

"What's it worth to read law in a country law office? The time for
that's past. He's right. And suppose he took me on, what would it do for
me? Look at Charlie. Doing hack work and dirty work to pay the rent of a
place to drink himself to death in. He's got brains enough. He knows law
enough. He's slaved and starved and got ready for his chance, and his
chance don't come. Why? Because he's Charlie Brady. Well I'm Neil
Donovan. I'm Irish, too, what they called me the first time I saw you--a
paddy."

"That's not the Colonel's fault."

"Who do you think gets the _Record_ job?"

Judith shook her blond head, disdaining to answer, a gathering storm in
her eyes.

"Chet Gaynor--Mr. J. Chester Gaynor. Lil Burr's brother. Her prize
brother, the one that's been fired from three prep schools. Everard got
him a scholarship at the last one."

"Why not? He ought to help his friends. He's a kind man and lots of fun.
It's not his fault if you don't get on. It's your own fault. You don't
have to work in a fish market if you don't want to, or sit there and
sneer at a man who doesn't care what you think of him. Abraham Lincoln
split rails----"

Judith stopped, amazed. Quite abruptly Neil had ceased to sit on the
steps and sneer. He was on his feet, hands clenched, thin body tense and
dangerous, face dead white and eyes blazing, as Judith had never seen
him before, or only once before, too angry for words, but not needing
them.

"Neil, do you really hate him? Hate him like that? I never thought you
meant it. But why--what has he done?"

"Care what I think? If I was any one else--your fool of a Willard--any
one in this town but me, I'd make him care."

"He's done nothing wrong. Neil, don't. Your eyes look all queer. You're
frightening me."

"No, he's done nothing wrong, nothing you could get him for. He's too
careful. He plays favourites. He fools women. He locks the door to every
chance to get on in this town and he sells the keys. He's got his hand
on the neck of the town, and he's shutting it tighter and tighter.
That's all he does. That's all Everard does."

"You can't prove it."

"He takes good care I can't."

"You can't prove a word of it."

"Your father could."

"He's kind to father. He's kind to me."

"You talk like a child."

"Well, you talk like my mother's cook.... Oh, Neil, I didn't mean to say
that. Forgive me. Where are you going? I didn't mean to say it."

"Let me go."

"You're hurting me."

"I hate you! You're one of them--one of the Everard crowd. I hate you,
too!"

"What are you going to do?" Her short, panting struggle with him over,
her wrists smarting from the backward twist that had broken her hold on
him, she leaned against the veranda rail breathless and stared with
fascinated eyes. When this quarrel had gone the way of their other
quarrels, atoned for by inarticulate words of infinite meaning,
justified by the keen delight of reconciling kisses, Judith was to keep
one picture from it: Neil as she saw him then, standing over her
white-faced and angry, ragged and splendid, Neil as she had seen him
once before.

"May-night!" she cried. "You look the way you did that May-night. I'm
afraid of you."

"Everard!" He turned from her, and looking at the windows again as if
the Colonel were behind him, swung back his arm, and sent it crashing
through the glass of the nearest one--once and a second time. "Oh, you
don't want me to call him Everard. Colonel Everard!"

"Neil, I'm afraid."

He looked at the fragments of broken glass and at Judith scornfully, but
the angry light was fading out of his eyes already, the magic light;
against her will she was sorry to see it go.

"Are you hurt? Did you hurt your hand?"

"What do you care if I did? Don't be afraid, Judy. He can pay for a pane
of glass or two. He wouldn't care if I burned his house down. Nobody
cares what I do. I'm a paddy."

Awkward, suddenly conscious of his snowshoes, he shuffled across the
matched boards of the Colonel's veranda and down the steps, turning
there for a farewell word:

"I'm going. Don't cry. I'm not worth it. I'm a paddy, from Paddy Lane."

Dream pictures, pleasant or sad, making her cheeks burn in the dark, or
little secret smiles come when Judith recalled them. Some lived in her
heart and some faded. Judith did not choose or reject them deliberately.
They chose or rejected themselves, arranging themselves into an
intricate pattern of growing clearness. She did not watch it grow. It
was only when it was quite complete that she would see it, but it was
growing fast.




CHAPTER EIGHT


"You'll find the coffee pot on the back of the stove. I'm washing out a
few things," said Mrs. Donovan.

Though she kept her five little nephews and nieces in dark-patterned
dresses or shirts, as the case might be, and encouraged her brother
Michael to wear flannel shirts, and even limited her eldest niece,
Maggie Brady, clerking in the Green River Dry Goods Emporium now,
instead of helping her father in his little store at the Falls, to three
white waists a week, she was usually washing out a few things.

The contending odours of damp clothes and rank coffee were as much a
part of the Brady kitchen as the dishes stacked in the sink for Neil to
wash, or the broken-legged, beautifully grained mahogany card table in
the warm corner near the stove, where his school books were piled, a
relic of his dead father's prosperous saloon-keeping days, or the view
of Larribee's Marsh through the curtainless windows with their torn
green shades.

The swampy field was the most improvident part of an improvident
purchase--a brown, tumbledown house, wind swept and cold,
inconveniently far from the settlement at the Falls and the larger town,
heavily mortgaged, and not paid for yet, but early on sunny spring
mornings like this the field was beautiful; level and empty and green,
the only monotonous thing in that restless stretch of New England
country, billowy with little hills, and rugged with clumps of trees. A
boy could people the sunlit emptiness of the field with airy creatures
of folk-lore, eagerly gleaned in a busy mother's rare story-telling
moments, or with Cæsar's cohorts marching across it, splendid in the
sun, if he had eyes for them. The only boy who ever had regarded the
familiar, glinting green of the field with unkindled eyes to-day as he
sat finishing his lukewarm breakfast. Yet it was Saturday morning, that
magic time, the last Saturday of his last spring vacation, and he had
only one more term of school before him.

On this Saturday morning he had an unpleasant errand to do, and he was
carefully dressed for it, just as he had been dressed for the Lyceum
declamation contest and ball the night before, but not so effectively,
for his best black suit showed threadbare in the morning sun, and the
shine on his shoes was painstakingly applied, and a heavy, even, blue
black, but they needed tapping. His brown eyes had a big, rather hungry
look that was unquestionably picturesque, and Miss Natalie Ward would
have approved of it, if his mother did not, watching him as she trailed
in and out of the room.

"Making out all right? Don't hurry," she said.

"I'm in no hurry to get there," agreed her son.

"He won't say no to you. He never has yet, and he likes you."

"Oh, he won't say no. Nothing new will happen to me in this town; not
even that."

Neil's mother paused, balancing her clothes basket against one hip, and
deftly favouring the string-mended handle, then put it heavily down, and
leaned on the table and looked at him--a small, tired, pretty woman,
with gray, far-away eyes that were like no other eyes in Green River,
and a smile like Neil's.

"Tired?" she said.

"Dog tired."

"Well, you were out till three."

"One. That was Maggie you heard at three. Where was she?"

"That's her business."

"It's Charlie's, if he's going to marry her."

"It's not yours, then. Never mind Maggie. Your uncle and I had a talk
about you last night."

"Why don't you ask to see my dance order?" He made a defensive clutch
at his pocket as if she had, and quick colour swept into his cheeks. She
watched it, and watched it fade, leaving his face tired and sullen, and
too old for its years. "Uncle!"

"He's been like a father to you."

"I've been two sons to him, then. He's worked me like two. If he grudges
the time I take off, I can make it up to him. There's been little enough
of it, and there'll be little more, and there's been little enough
enjoyment in it, and I'm not ashamed of it. Why don't he spy on his own
daughter, if he's curious? Why----" This outburst ended as suddenly as
it began, in a short, sullen laugh as he pushed his empty cup away. "Dan
thinks he can land something for me with the telephone company. I
couldn't send money home at first, but I'd be off your hands. Tell that
to Uncle."

"Would you be with Dan, in Wells?"

"Somewhere outside Wells. It won't be too gay. You needn't be afraid
I'll go to too many dances."

"Don't glare at me. I'm not your uncle."

"Sorry. I don't know what's wrong with me."

"Don't you?"

He flushed, laughed, and ignored the question, producing a small box and
offering it. "I got that last night. Don't wipe your hands. They're good
enough to handle it wet." A gold medal glittered in her hand. He
observed it without enthusiasm, and noticing that, his mother shut the
box abruptly.

"Neil, that's the first prize."

"Looks like it. I spoke the Gettysburg address, and they always fall for
that. Good-bye, I'm off."

"Neil, come back here."

He swung round with his cap doubled under his arm, and stood before her,
helpless and sullen, hedged about with that sudden dignity which no
woman creature can break through, but seeming to derive no comfort from
it. Painful colour mounted to her cheeks, as if the effort of keeping
him there was all she could manage without the effort of opening
delicate subjects.

"Neil, I'm worried about you."

"Why? Are you afraid I'll marry beneath me? I won't marry without your
consent. It's not being done."

"You got three dollars from the _Clarion_ last week."

"Are you afraid I'll try to support a wife on it?"

"It's the most you've made from them. Why weren't you proud of it? Why
aren't you proud of this prize? A year ago you'd have had me up at one
to speak your piece to me. There's no life in you, and no pride, and I
know why."

"Me with so much to be proud of."

"You're good enough for any girl, but----"

"Do you think I don't know my place, with the whole town teaching it to
me going on eighteen years? I've got no false hopes, and I shan't lose
my head over any girl. Let me be."

"It's not the town that's taught you your place, it's----"

"Don't you say her name."

"--empty headed and overdressed."

"Go on. Judith Randall don't care what you think of her."

"Can't you even get up enough spirit to stand up for her? You that
thought you had your fortune all but made when you got the chickens paid
for, and followed me round the house, telling me how you'd run the town?
You that could tell what was wrong with the _Record_ editorials, if you
couldn't pay for a year's subscription to the paper? You----"

"Yes, I come from one of the five lines in Ireland what have a right to
the O', but you never tell me that unless you've got something else to
tell me that you're afraid to tell. What is it this time?"

"You come of Irish kings."

"What did Uncle say last night?"

"Well, he's getting to be an old man."

"What did he say?"

His mother did not reply. She avoided his eyes, and made no further
criticism of him, or of a young lady who was no doubt as indifferent to
her criticisms as Neil said, since she did not recognize Mrs. Donovan on
the street.

"Uncle," Neil decided deliberately, "wants me to help in the store. I
can't go to Wells."

"He can't get on alone now Maggie's gone. We need your board money to
run the house at all. Dan was wild to get away from Green River, but in
two years he's got no farther than Wells, and ten dollars a week. I know
we ought to leave you free to start yourself, if we can't give you a
start, but----"

"Is that all you want to tell me?"

She put out an unaccustomed arm and pulled him awkwardly close. He came
obediently, and patted her shoulder stiffly but did not kiss her. "I
know what this means," she asserted, and showed a rapidly forming
intention of crying on his shoulder. "It hurts me like it does you."

[Illustration: "'_I know what this means,' she asserted_'"]

"It don't hurt me. I ought to have seen it myself. I ought not to have
planned to go. It's all right, mother. Is that all?"

"All? It's enough. I was awake half the night planning to break it to
you."

"You broke it all right. I'll be going." He shook out his crushed
cap, and adjusted it with dignity, looking at her calmly out of
impenetrable eyes, like a young prince ending an audience, with more
power behind him than he knew, kissed her gravely on the cheek with cool
young lips, and opened the door, and walked off into the sunshine.

"It's the girl," said his mother, but not until the door had closed
behind him. "No girl is good enough to do what she's done to you." Then
she selected the frilliest of Maggie's blouses, which had dried while
she talked, and spread it on the ironing table to sprinkle again.

Neil did not look like a young man crossed in love, or a young man with
his future wrecked by a word. He did not give a backward glance to the
little brown house with the sun on its many-paned windows, or seem to
hear the children's voices from the old barn behind the house--the
favourite refuge of the little Bradys when they were banished from the
kitchen--that echoed after him in the clear morning air, shrill and then
fainter as he left the place behind.

He had settled into his usual pace for this familiar walk--a steady
stride that you could fit the unmanageable parts of a Latin verb to the
rhythm of, or the refractory words of a song; but it was not a usual
day. It was the first warm day of that April, warmer already, with the
goading urge of spring in the softening air that frets and troubles with
new desires and a sense of unfitness for them at once, and will not let
you be. The road, fringed with scattering trees, and wind-swept and
bleak on winter days, was golden with new sunlight, spongy underfoot,
but drying under your eyes in the morning sun. The boy's brooding face
did not change as he walked, but his shoulders straightened themselves,
and lost their patient look, and his lean young body gave itself more
gayly to the swing of his pace and looked strong and free, alive with
the unconscious strength of youth that must be caught and harnessed to
make the wheels of the world go round before it can be taught what its
purpose is.

Whether it troubled him or not--his face did not tell--all that his
mother had hinted was wrong with his world, and more. No outsider had
ever won a place like Neil's in Green River High School society so far
as the unwritten history of it recorded. Charlie Brady in his time, and
Dan after him, had been extra men at big dances, hard worked and
patronized in school entertainments, more intimate with the boys than
the girls. Charlie, deep in a secret love affair with Lil Gaynor, had
still called her Miss in public, and treated her as respectfully as he
did now that the affair was forgotten and she was Mrs. Burr and one of
the Everard circle. Charlie and Dan had only looked over impassable
barriers. Neil had been really inside--included in small, intimate
parties, like week-ends at Camp Hiawatha, openly favoured by Natalie, if
not Judith--inside and he would soon be shut out.

There were new signs of it every day. The long, friendly winter, when he
had been safe in that intimate fellowship, was over. The girls were
planning their gowns for college commencement dances. Willard came back
from a week-end at the state university pledged to a fraternity there
and refusing to discuss minor subjects. God-like creatures in amazing
neckties condescended to visit him, and Natalie was beginning to collect
fraternity pins. Rena and Ed were engaged, and under the impression that
it was a secret, and a place was being made for Ed in the bank. In one
way or another, the world was opening to all of them, and closing to
Neil.

And with the spring, the Everards had come back to Green River. The big,
over-decorated house had not been open a week, but already they pervaded
the town. Their cars whirled through the splashing spring streets, and
ladies not upon Mrs. Everard's calling list peered at the passengers to
see who was in her favour. The Colonel was turning the Hiawatha Club
into a private camp, and closing it to the town, but nobody protested
much. He was ordering a complete set of slip covers from the furniture
department of Ward's Emporium, and the daring group of prominent
business men who ventured to assail the Colonel's political views and
private morals sometimes in the little room at the rear of the store
lacked support from Ward. Neil had the run of the store and hung about
and listened, but never contributed. Whether these criticisms were
justified or not, the Everards were back again.

Judith had given up the Lyceum dance for the first of the Everard
dinners the night before. It was three days since Neil had seen her, and
he was to see her to-day, but he was showing no impatience for the
meeting. The end of the world, not the beginning of it, that was what
spring would mean to him, and that is a graver catastrophe at eighteen
than at eighty. The boy who was facing it had passed the outlying
straggle of houses, and had come to the edge of the town, and to the end
of the long, hilly street that led down past the court-house, straight
into Post Office Square, the heart of the town. It was still empty of
traffic at ten, and looked sunny and empty and clean, wide-awake for the
day. He took his hands out of his pockets, stopped whistling "Amos
Moss," and hurried down Court-house Hill, stepping in time to the tune
of it.

A mud-splashed Ford clattered down Main Street, and drew up in front of
the post-office as Neil reached it with a flourish that would have done
credit to a more elegant equipage than this second-hand one of the
Nashes. Two elegant young gentlemen, week-end guests of Willard's and
duly presented to Neil the night before, ignored his existence, perusing
a gaudily covered series of topical songs with exaggerated attention on
the rear seat of the car, but Willard greeted him exuberantly:

"Ah, there, Murph. You don't look like the morning after. Sorry I
haven't got room for you. We've got other plans. We love the ladies."

"I'm tied up, anyway. So long."

Willard's tone was too patronizing, but he was not to blame, for the
days when they would exchange intimate greetings at all were numbered.
As Neil left them one of the elegant guests demanded audibly:

"Who's your friend?"

Neil flushed but did not look back. He had an errand to do in the few
minutes before his appointment with Judge Saxon. He crossed the street
to Ward's store.

Ward's Dry Goods Emporium, three stores in one, and literally three
stores bought out one by one, and joined by connecting doors, though
they could never be united in their style of architecture, was rather
dark and chaotic inside, though a brave showing of plate glass across
the front advertised its prosperity. Luther Ward himself, in his shirt
sleeves, was looking over a tray of soiled, pale-coloured spats,
assisted by a tall, full-bodied girl with a sweet, sulky mouth, and a
towering mass of blue-black hair.

"Hello, Donovan, what's new?" he said, with only a shade more
condescension than Willard, and distinctly more friendliness.

"Nothing, sir," said Neil with conviction.

"You want to talk to Maggie, here. I won't intrude on a family quarrel,"
said Mr. Ward, and chuckling heartily at his own mild joke, as he
generally did, and few others did, disappeared into the furniture
department, the central one of the three stores, and his favourite. The
two cousins regarded each other across the tray of spats as if the
family quarrel were not a joke, but an unpleasant reality.

"You can't come here and take up my time," stated Miss Brady.

"Your time is pretty full--evenings, too. Do you know where Charlie was
last night?"

"I don't care."

"You ought. He's your second cousin, and goes by the same name as you,
if you're not in love with him. He was in Halloran's billiard hall."

"If he can't keep himself out of the gutter, I can't keep him out,"
stated Miss Brady logically.

"Well, don't push him in," her cousin advised, but the light of battle
had died out of his eyes, leaving them listless. "It's nothing to me. I
only came to bring you this."

He produced something from an inner pocket and tossed it on the counter,
something wrapped in a twist of newspaper, which parted as the girl bent
eagerly over it, something which shone and twinkled alluringly, as she
straightened it out with caressing fingers and held it up to the
light--a little necklace of rather ornate design and startling colours,
crimson stones and green and blue, the gayest of toys.

"Seems to be yours all right."

His cousin, who seemed to have forgotten his existence for one rapt
moment, remembered it with a start. "Did you show this to your mother?"
she asked sharply.

"Why?"

"Well, she don't like to have me spend my money on imitation jewellery."
Miss Brady delivered this very natural explanation haltingly.

"Do you?"

One of the sudden, vivid blushes which had helped to establish her
reputation as a beauty overspread Miss Brady's cheek. "I missed it this
morning and didn't have time to hunt for it, and I was worried. I don't
want to show it to her. It cost a good deal."

"It must have. They say a ruby's the only stone you can't imitate."

"What do you mean?" Miss Brady's cheeks grew still redder. "Why don't
you save your big talk for Saxon? You may need it. Why don't you mind
your own affairs, and leave mine alone?"

"Leave that on the kitchen floor for mother to find and sweep up in a
broken dust-pan, or one of the kids to show to your father?"

"Why not? Haven't I got a right to do what I want with my own money?
Haven't I got a right to do what I want with myself? Who are you to
dictate to me, with the Randall girl making a fool of you? Why----"

"That will be all." Though Miss Brady's voice had been threatening to
make itself heard throughout all the three stores in one, she stopped
obediently, looking defiant but frightened, but when her cousin spoke
again the ring of authority which had shocked her was gone from his
voice.

"Don't be scared. It's nothing to me what you do, and I shan't talk too
much. You know me, Mag."

"No, I don't, not lately. You act doped, not half there. I can't make
you out. If you think--if you suspect----"

"I don't. It's nothing to me. I'm due at Saxon's. Put your glass beads
away before Ward sees them. Good luck to you."

Miss Brady, standing quite still in one of her carefully cultivated,
statuesque poses, watched her cousin cross the street and disappear into
a narrow and shabbily painted doorway there. Then she took his advice,
and producing a red morocco wrist bag from under the counter, shut the
necklace into it with a vicious snap, as if she did not derive so much
pleasure as before from handling it now.

Her cousin climbed the three flights of stairs to Judge Saxon's office.
The stairs were dingy and looked unswept, and a pane of glass in the
door of the untenanted suite across the landing from the Judge's was
broken. Nothing about the Judge's quarters indicated that he was Colonel
Everard's attorney, a big man in the town before the Everard régime, and
under it--an unusual combination. His office was shabby outside and in.
The lettering on the door, Saxon and Burr, Attorneys-at-Law, looked
newer than it was by contrast, and it was still only six months old.
Theodore Burr had his delayed junior partnership at last.

The Judge's young client did not pause to collect himself on the worn
door-mat, as he had done when he first came here on errands like this.
They were an old story to him now, and so were scenes like the one with
Maggie, which he had just come through so creditably. He looked quite
unruffled by it, calm as people are when they have no troubles to
bear--or when they have borne all they can, and are about to find relief
in establishing the fact. He knocked and stepped inside.




CHAPTER NINE


A fire in the air-tight stove in the corner had taken the early morning
chill from the room and been permitted to burn out, now that the morning
sun came in warm through the dusty windows, but the room was still close
and cloudy with wood smoke. At a battered, roll-topped desk in the
sunniest window Mr. Theodore Burr was struggling with the eccentricities
of an ancient Remington, and looking superior to it and to all his
surroundings, but the Judge was nowhere to be seen.

Mr. Burr was a very large, very pink young man, with blond hair which
would have looked too good to be true on a woman, and near-set,
green-blue eyes which managed to look vacant and aggressive at the same
time. He was wearing a turquoise-blue tie which accentuated their
effectiveness, and he occupied himself ostentatiously with the Remington
for quite three minutes before he turned his most vacant and aggressive
look upon his client.

"Well, Donovan?" he said.

Mr. Burr's manner was as patronizing as Mr. Ward's with the
friendliness left out, but his client was not chilled by it.

"Theodore, where's the Judge?" he asked.

"Mr. Burr." The pink young man turned two shades pinker as he made the
correction. "The Judge is engaged."

"I don't believe it."

Mr. Burr laughed unpleasantly and held up his hand. From the other side
of a door labelled private--misleadingly, for the Judge's little
sanctum, where half the town had the privilege of crowding in and
tipping back chairs and smoking, was the nearest approach to a clubroom
that the town afforded, now that the Hiawatha Club was no more--muffled
voices were faintly audible.

"You can talk to me," said Mr. Burr.

"I can, and I can go away and come back when he's not engaged. He said
he'd see me."

"He's changed his mind. He don't want to see you. I know all about your
case."

"You've learned a lot in six months."

"Talk like that won't get you anything, Donovan, here or anywhere else,"
remarked Mr. Burr, reasonably, if somewhat offensively. Admitting it,
his client dropped into one of the Judge's big office chairs, and sat
there, fingering his cap as he talked, and looking suddenly beaten and
tired.

"You're right, Theodore. Well, what's all this you know about my case?"

"Mike Brady sends you here begging when he's ashamed to come himself.
It's hard on you, Neil."

"My uncle's too busy to come. Is that all you know?"

"I know what you want to-day, and you can't have it."

"What do I want?"

Mr. Burr's manner had become alarmingly official, but his client
continued to smile at him, and to fold and unfold his cap methodically.

"An extension of time on your uncle's mortgage. The principal is due the
first of next month. You've kept the Judge waiting twice for the
interest, the security is insufficient, the bank holds a first mortgage
on the house, and for fourteen months your uncle has made no payment to
the Judge whatever."

"Don't rub it in, Theodore."

"This is no laughing matter. Business is business," stated the junior
partner importantly.

"More like charity, with the Judge, but Uncle isn't holding him up for
much this time. Uncle's getting on his feet. The Judge never expected
him to, and I didn't, but the automobiles help. Maggie served tea before
she went to Ward's, and he's going on with it. His luck has turned.
He's got the money to pay this year's interest and half the back
interest that's due, but he wants to keep it and put it into
repairs--the roof wants shingling, and if we could fix up the storeroom
for a place to serve tea and ice-cream we could double trade. Then, next
year----"

"We've heard too much about next year, Donovan."

"Don't get tragic, Theodore. This is a new proposition. I'll go into
figures with the Judge and prove it to him--don't want to waste them on
you. But he won't be sending good money after bad this time, like he's
done too many times. I'm as glad for him as I am for Uncle."

"It can't be done."

"Nonsense, Theodore. I won't wait to see the Judge now, but you tell
him----"

"It don't make any difference what I tell him. The Judge has made up his
mind, and he won't change it. You can take it from me as well as him.
You won't get another dollar of his money, and you won't get another
month's extension of time. We're done with you."

"I almost believe you mean that, Theodore."

"As I said, the house is insufficient security, but for the sake of the
dignity of the firm we must protect ourselves----"

"I believe you mean it, and the Judge gave you authority to say it."

"We must go through the form of protecting ourselves and----"

His client laughed. "You don't mean the Judge wants to take over the
house. That's 'Way Down East stuff. If money's tight with him, we'll pay
the interest and manage some way, though I don't see how. But the house
would be no good to him if he took it, and he wouldn't take it if it
was. I know the Judge. Don't let your imagination get away with you,
Theodore."

"I'm sorry for you, Donovan."

"You think he's going to take it?"

"I know he is."

"You mean that," his client decided slowly, "and you've got the Judge's
authority for it, too."

"Take it quietly. It's the best way," urged the junior partner
helpfully.

"I understand that's your motto, Theodore," said his client, and
proceeded to take his advice, sitting quite still in the Judge's big
chair, and fixing a clear-seeing but unappreciative gaze upon the
immaculate folds of Mr. Burr's turquoise-blue tie. He took the advice
too literally. The silence grew oppressive and sinister, and as if he
found it so, Mr. Burr broke into a monologue, disjointed, but made up
of irreproachable sentiments.

"This is hard on your uncle, Neil, and it's hard on you, but it may be
the best thing in the end. He's been hiding behind you too long. A
business that can't stand on its own feet deserves to fail. He can start
new and start clean. The Judge has been a good friend to you----"

"Don't explain him to me. You don't own him, whoever else does,"
interrupted the Judge's protégé softly.

"What do you mean? If you don't think you're getting a square deal, say
so."

"Do you want me to weep on your shoulder, Theodore?"

"The Judge is your friend, and," Mr. Burr added handsomely, "I'm your
friend, too."

His client arose briskly, as if encouraged by this. "Theodore, you don't
want to tell me what's back of your turning me down?" he asked. "No, I
thought not. Well----"

"I'm your friend," repeated Mr. Burr, generously if irrelevantly, and
this time without effect. His client had crossed the room without
another glance at him, and had his hand on the knob of the Judge's
office door. His manner still had the composure which Mr. Burr had
advocated, but his face was very pale, ominously pale, and his brown
eyes were changed and bright, dangerously bright. To imaginative eyes
like Mr. Burr's he must have looked suddenly taller.

Mr. Burr was facing an unmistakable crisis, with no time to wonder how
long it had been forming, or why. He hurried after the boy and caught
him fiercely if ineffectively by the arm.

"You can't go in there," stated Mr. Burr arbitrarily, all logic
deserting him. "You can't. You don't know----"

"Oh, I'm not going to knife the Judge," his client explained kindly.
"I'm only going to find out what's back of this."

"Take it quietly," was the ill-chosen sentiment which suggested itself
to Mr. Burr. Neil Donovan swung round angrily, and paused to reply to
it, with fires which the somewhat negative though offensive personality
of the pink young man could never have kindled alight in his brown eyes.

"Quietly? There's been too much of that in this town. I'm sick of it.
The only friend I've got who hasn't got one foot in the gutter goes back
on me for no reason at all, the first time I ask a favour of him that
don't amount to picking his pockets. The only big man in this rotten
town who's halfway straight since Everard turned the town rotten begins
to act like he wasn't straight. What's back of it? I'm going to know.
Get out of my way, Theodore."

"You don't know who's in there."

"I don't care. I'm going to know." Disposing of the hovering and anxious
intervention of Mr. Burr, and throwing the door open, he slammed it in
the pink young man's perturbed face, and stepped alone out of the
sunshine into the Judge's dim little inner office.

The Judge's friendly littered little room was not so inviting in working
hours as it was in the hospitable hours of late afternoon. It was like a
woman seen in evening dress by daylight. But the boy who had invaded it
so hotly unmasked no conspiracy here. The men at the table near the one
window, with a pile of official but entirely innocent looking papers
between them, had every right to be there. They were the Judge and
Colonel Everard.

The great man looked quite undisturbed by the boy's invasion, glancing
up at him indifferently from the papers that he was turning over with
his finely moulded, delicately used hands; he even looked mildly amused,
but the boy turned to him first instinctively, and not to the Judge, who
was peering at him with troubled and kindly eyes over the top of his
glasses.

"I've got to speak to the Judge. I'm sorry."

He stammered out his half-apology awkwardly enough, but the smouldering
fires were still alight in his brown eyes, tragic fires of cowed and
rebellious youth. The great man regarded him indifferently for a minute
and then turned rather ostentatiously to his papers again.

"Judge, I've got to speak to you alone."

"You can't just now, son."

"I've got to."

"Why?"

The Judge's kind, drawling voice was not quite as usual, and his blue,
near-sighted eyes were not; they were wistful and deprecating, and
rather tired, a beaten man's eyes, eyes with an irresistible appeal to
the race that is vowed to lost causes, this boy's race. The boy stepped
instinctively closer.

"I don't blame you, sir, but I've got to understand this and know what's
behind it."

"Better go home before you say anything you'll be sorry for, Neil."

"Why did you go back on me?"

"You're taking a sentimental attitude about a business matter. It's
natural enough that you should. I'm sorry for you, son."

"Why----"

The Judge drew himself up a shade straighter in his chair, and met the
boy's insistent challenge with sudden dignity, kindly but judicial,
peculiarly his own, but his flashes of it were not very frequent now.

"Neil," he said deliberately, "I've got nothing to say to you alone.
I've got nothing to say to you at all that Mr. Burr hasn't said. Is that
quite clear to you?"

It was entirely clear. The Judge had left no room for uncertainty or
argument, and the boy did not attempt to argue or even to answer. He
stood looking uncertainly down at the Judge, as if for the moment he
could not see anything in the room quite distinctly, the Judge's face,
with its near-sighted blue eyes and red-gold beard and thinning hair, or
Colonel Everard's clear-cut profile.

"Better go," said the Judge gently.

"I'd better go," the boy repeated mechanically, but he did not move.

Colonel Everard put down his papers deliberately, and favoured him with
a glance, amused and surprised, as if he had not expected to find him
still in the room, and was prepared to forget at once that he was there;
a disconcerting sort of glance, but the boy's brown eyes met it
gallantly, and cleared as they looked. They grew bright and defiant
again, with a little laugh in the depths of them. The ghost of a laugh,
too, lurked in the boy's low voice somewhere.

"You're right, Judge. I'll go. I'm wasting my time here," he said,
"asking you who's back of what you've done to me--when I know. I won't
ask you again, but I'll ask you, I'll ask you both, who's back of
everything that's crooked or wrong in this town? Little or big, he's
back of it all; straight back of it, or well back of it, hiding his face
and pulling the wires. He's to blame for it all, for he's made the town
what it is.

"He's got his hand on the neck of the town, and got hold of it tighter,
gradual, so nobody saw it and knocked it off; tighter and tighter,
squeezing the life out. He never made a gift to the town with one hand
that he didn't take it back with the other. What the town gets without
him giving it, he won't let it keep. The whole town's got his stamp on
it, grafting and lying and putting up a front. The whole town's afraid
of him. The Judge here, that's the best man in town, don't dare call his
soul his own. Me, I'm afraid of him, too, and the only reason I dare
stand up and say to his face what's said behind his back is because I've
got nothing to lose. It's him, there----"

"Don't, son," muttered the Judge tardily, unregarded, but Colonel
Everard listened courteously, with a faint, amused smile growing rather
stiff on his thin lips.

"Him, that's too good to speak to me or look at me, sitting there
grinning, and reading fine print, making out not to care, he's back of
it all--him, Everard."

The two men, who had heard him out, did not interrupt him now. It was
only a passionate jumble of boyish words they had listened to, but
behind it, vibrating in his tense voice, was something bigger than he
could frame words to express, something that commanded silence; pain
forcing its way into speech, long repression broken at last. The dignity
of it was about him still, though his brown eyes flashed no more
defiance, and he was only a shabby and hopeless boy walking uncertainly
to the office door, and fumbling with the handle.

"I'll go out this way," he said. "I've had enough of Theodore. And I've
had enough of this place. I'll say good morning, gentlemen."

In a prosaic and too often unsatisfactory world, which is not the stage,
no curtain drops to relieve you of the embarrassment of thinking what to
say next after a record speech; you have to step out of the limelight,
and walk somewhere else. Neil Donovan, emerging from the ancient
building which contained Judge Saxon's office into Post-office Square
after a brief interval of struggling successfully for self-control in a
dusty corridor little suited to such struggles, and not even ensuring
the privacy which is wrongly believed to be necessary for them, had one
more appointment to keep. He was late for it already. He glanced at the
town clock and started off hurriedly to keep it.

Back of Court-house Hill another street, starting parallel to Court
Street, rapidly loses its sense of direction and its original character
of a business street, wavers to right and left, past a scatter of
discouraged looking houses, and finally slants off in the general
direction of the woods at the edge of the town, and the abortive,
sparsely wooded hill known to generations of picnickers--not the élite
of the town, but humbler, more rowdy picnickers--as Mountain Rock.

The street never reaches it, but loses itself in a grubby tangle of
smaller streets, thickly set with small houses, densely and untidily
populated, the section known at first derisively and later in good faith
as Paddy Lane. Through the intricate geography of this quarter Colonel
Everard's only openly declared enemy might have been seen making a hasty
and expert way ten minutes later; quickly and directly as it permitted
him to, he approached the base of the hill.

Disregarding more public and usual ways of ascent, he struck straight
across a stubbly field that lay behind a row of peculiarly forlorn and
tumbledown houses into a path so narrow that it was hard to see until
you were actually looking down it, between the twin birches that marked
the entrance. He followed it to the base of the cliff itself. The belt
of stunted birches and dusty-looking alders that skirted the cliff was
broken by an occasional scraggly pine. The boy stopped under one of
them, leaned against the decaying trunk, produced a letter, and read it.

It was only a pencilled scrawl of a letter, on the roughest of copy
paper, and so crumpled that he must have been quite familiar with it,
but he read it intently.

     "Neil," it ran, "I'll meet you Saturday, on top of Mountain Rock,
     same time and place. I shan't see you till then. I don't want to.
     You frightened me last night. I don't like you lately. Be nice to
     me Saturday. JUDITH."

Only a pencilled scrawl, but he knew every word of it by heart, and of
the burst of excited speech in the Judge's office nothing remained in
his mind but the general impression that he had made a fool of himself
there. Perhaps he was too familiar with Judith's letter, for the sting
he had found there at first was gone from the words. He looked at them
dully.

"I can't stand much more," he said aloud.

He said it lifelessly, and with no defiance in his eyes, stating only a
wearisome fact. He had seen the Colonel's face through a kind of red
mist in the Judge's office, and felt reckless and strong. He did not
feel like a hero now. He was tired.

He would hardly have cared just now if you had told him that back in
Judge Saxon's office two men who had not moved from their chairs since
he left them, and who would not move until several vital points were
settled, were discussing something he would not have believed them
capable of discussing at such length and with so much feeling--the
fortunes of the Donovan family.

He did not care just now for the little sights and sounds of spring that
were all around him, the cluster of arbutus leaves at his feet, the
faint, nestling bird noises, sweeter than song, and the stir and rustle
of tiny, unclassified sounds that were signs of the pulse of spring
beating everywhere, of change and growth going on whether human beings
perceived or denied it.

"I can't stand any more," said the boy.

Up the cliff to his right, strewn with pine needles that were brown-gold
in the sun, a steep and tiny trail led the way to the top of the hill
and his rendezvous. Now the boy crushed Judith's letter into his pocket,
turned to the trail with a sigh, and began to climb.




CHAPTER TEN


"They won't like it, Judith," said Mrs. Randall for the last time, as
she slipped into her evening coat.

"They? If you mean the Colonel----"

"I do."

Judith, looking up at her mother from the chaise-longue, could not have
seen the radiant vision that she had adored as a child, when the spring
and the Everards and the habit of evening dress all returned at once to
Green River. Mrs. Randall's blue gown was the creation of a Wells
dressmaker, but lacked the charm of earlier evening frocks, anxiously
contrived with the help of a local seamstress, when the clear blue that
was still her favourite colour had been her best colour, when there was
a touch more pink in the warm white of her complexion, and before the
tiny, worried line in her broad, low forehead was there to stay. But
there was no reflection of these changes in her daughter's big, watching
eyes.

"It will do him good not to like it," said Judith sweetly.

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, nothing, Mamma. Is that the carriage? Don't be
late."

Minna Randall looked down at her daughter in puzzled silence a moment,
with the little line in her forehead deepening, then slipped to her
knees beside her with a disregard for her new gown which was unusual,
and put a caressing hand on her forehead, a demonstration which was more
unusual still.

"Your head does feel hot," she said, "but to stay away from a dance at
your age, just for a headache----"

"I went to one last night."

"A high school dance!"

"There won't be any more of them. You needn't grudge it to me." Judith
buried her face in the cushions, and lay very still.

"But the Colonel really arranged this for you. Dancing bores him. He
said you ought to be amused."

"He didn't say so to me."

"Are you laughing? I thought you were crying a minute ago." Judith gave
no further signs of either laughing or crying. "Judith, what does he say
to you? When you went with him to look at that night-blooming flower
with the queer name, last week, and were gone so long, what did he talk
to you about? You heard me. Please answer."

"He's a stupid old thing."

"What did he talk about?"

"I don't remember."

"Judith," Judith's mother stood plucking ineffectively at her long
gloves, and looking at the motionless white figure, very slender and
childish against the chintz of the cushions, soft, tumbled hair, and
hidden face, with a growing trouble in her eyes, "I ought to talk to
you--I ought to tell you--you're old enough now--old enough----"

Judith turned with a soft, nestling movement, and opened her eyes again,
deep, watchful eyes that asked endless questions, and made it impossible
to answer them, eyes that knew no language but their own, the secret and
alien language of youth. Her mother sighed.

"You're the strangest child. Sometimes you seem a hundred years old, and
sometimes--you don't feel too badly to stay alone? Mollie would have
stayed in with you, or Norah."

"No. I would have gone, if I'd known you cared so much, but it won't do
any good to make yourself late, Mamma. Father's calling," said Judith
gravely. Still grave and unrelaxed, she returned her mother's rare
good-night kiss, and watched her sweep out of the room, turning the
rose-shaded night lamp low as she passed.

There was a hurry of preparation downstairs, her mother's low, fretful
voice and her father's high and strained one joined in a heated
argument, and they started still deep in it, for her father did not call
a good-night to Judith. The street door shut, and she was alone in the
house. Carriage wheels creaked out of the yard and there was no
returning sound of them in search of some forgotten thing; a long enough
interval passed so that it was safe to infer that there would not be,
but Judith lay as her mother had left her, as still as if her headache
were really authentic, her questioning eyes on the rose-shaded light.

There was much that might have increased her mother's concern for her in
her face, if you could interpret it fully; sometimes the eyes suggested
a fair proportion of the hundred years her mother had credited her with,
sometimes there was dawning fear in them, and sometimes an inconsequent,
gipsy light; sometimes her soft lips trembled pitifully, and sometimes
they smiled. Always it was a lovely face, rose flushed and eager in the
rosy light, and always something was evident which was enough to account
for her mother's concern and for more concern than her mother was
capable of feeling; Miss Judith Devereux Randall was growing up.

Whatever questions occupied her answered themselves in a satisfactory
way at last, even an amusing way, for her smile had come to stay and
her eyes were dancing, when she jumped up from the chaise-longue at
last, turned on more lights, opened closets and bureau drawers all at
once, dropped various hastily chosen and ill-assorted articles on the
immaculate counterpane of her bed, and began to dress.

She dressed without a glance into the mirror, and without need of it, it
appeared, when she stood before it at last, pulling a left-over winter
tam over rebellious curls which she had made no attempt to subdue. She
had buttoned herself hastily into the dress she had taken off last, a
tumbled organdy, and thrown a disreputable polo coat over it, white like
the cap, but of more prehistoric date, but on her slender person these
incongruous garments had acquired a harmony of their own, and become a
costume somehow. It might not have withstood a long or critical
inspection, but it was not subjected to one. Youth, in its divinely
suited garb of white, regarded itself with grave eyes for one breathless
minute, flushed and coquetted with itself for another, and then was gone
from the mirror. Judith turned off the lights and stole out of the room,
and downstairs.

There was nothing in the dark and empty house to frighten her. It must
have been fear of whatever was before her that made her slip so softly
across the hall, and tremble and stand still when the door chain
rattled. The door was open at last. With a soft, inarticulate gasp of
excitement, she stepped out into the May night.

Colonel Everard had an ideal night for the little dance in his garden,
warm, but with a quiver of new life in the air. The May moon was in its
last quarter, but lanterns were to supplement it. But the Colonel's
guest of honour, pausing at the corner of Main Street and looking
sharply to left and right, and then turning quickly off it, found very
little light on the narrow and tree-fringed cross-street through which
she was hurrying now but the moon.

It hung slender and pale and low above the ragged row of little houses,
and seemed to go with her through the dark, but she took no notice of
its companionship. The street was deserted, and the tap of her little
heels sounded disconcertingly loud in the emptiness of it as she hurried
on, turning from the narrow street into a narrower one.

This street had only one real end; pending the appropriation needed to
carry it straight through, witheld by agencies which could only be
connected by guess with Colonel Everard, it led feebly past a few houses
which were nearly all untenanted and looked peculiarly so to-night, to a
clump of alders at the edge of an unpenetrated wood lot, where it had
paused. Just in front of it the girl paused, too.

Her small, white-coated figure was only dimly to be seen in the dark of
the street; the group in the shadow of the trees was harder to see, but
it moved; a horse pawed the ground impatiently, the boy in the buggy
leaned forward and spoke to him. Then Judith started uncertainly toward
him, and spoke softly, in the arrogant phrasing of lovers, to whom there
is only one "you" in the world:

"Is that you?"

"Is it you?" the boy's voice came hoarse through the dark. "I thought
you weren't coming. I waited an hour for you yesterday on the Rock."

"I couldn't help it. I oughn't to be here now, and I almost didn't come,
but I thought we'd have to-night. Neil, you hurt my hand. Be nice to
me."

She was standing close beside him now, and they could see each other's
faces, white and strange in the dark, but the boy's looked whiter, and
his breath came oddly, in irregular gasps. He held both her hands in
his, but he did not bend down to her, nor kiss her.

"What makes you look so queer? I don't like you. Be nice to me." There
was something terribly wrong with the smug little phrases, or with any
words at all just then, there in the heart of the silent dark, and
facing the strangeness of the boy's eyes; words failed her suddenly, and
she pulled her hands away, and hid her face in them. "I won't go with
you--I'll go home, if you aren't nice to me--if----"

"You can't go home now." There was something in the boy's voice that was
like the fierce clasp of his hands, something from which it was not so
easy to escape. "It might be better if you hadn't come, better for both
of us, but you can't go back now. It's too late. Yes, we'll have
to-night. Get in, Judith."




CHAPTER ELEVEN


"Get in, Judith."

"I won't go. You can't make me."

The boy did not answer or move. Boy and buggy and horse--Charlie Brady's
ancient chestnut mare, not such a dignified creature by daylight, but
high shouldered and mysterious now against the dark of the grove--might
all have been part of the surrounding dark, they were so still, and
Judith's little white figure was motionless, too.

Judith stood looking up at the boy for one long, silent minute. Such
minutes are really longer than other minutes, if you measure them by
heartbeats, and how else are you to measure them? Strange, breathless
minutes, that settle grave questions irrevocably by the mere fact of
their passing, whether you watch them pass with open eyes or are
helpless and young and vaguely afraid before them; helpless, but full of
the untaught strength of youth, which works miracles without knowing how
or why.

"Get in," said the boy, very softly this time, so that his voice just
made itself heard through the dark; it was like part of the dark,
caressing and hushed and secret, and not to be denied. With a soft
little laugh that was attuned to it, Judith yielded suddenly, and
slipped into the carriage beside him, drawing the robe tight round her,
and settling into her corner, all with one quick, nestling motion, like
a bird perching.

"Where are we going?" she said rather breathlessly, "Hurry. Let's go a
long, long way."

"All right. Don't be frightened, Judith."

"Frightened?"

He did not answer. Charlie's horse, debarred from its destined career by
bad driving, that broke its wind in its first race, but of sporting
ancestry and unable to forget it, especially when Charlie's adventures
in the Green River under-world cheated it of exercise too long, was
remembering it now, and bolting down the hilly little street, settled at
last into a jerky and tentative gait with the air of accepting their
guidance until it could arrange further plans, but remembering its
ancestry still.

"Splendid," Judith breathed. "Keep off Main Street."

"Yes."

The ancient vehicle, well oiled, but rattling faintly still, swung
alarmingly close to one street corner lamp-post and then another. Judith
nestled almost out of sight in her corner. Neil leaned forward,
gripping the reins with an ungloved hand that whitened at the knuckles,
his dark eyes looking straight ahead. His brooding eyes and quiet mouth,
and even the whiteness of his face had something unfamiliar about them,
something that did not all come from the unhealthy light of the street
lamps, something strange but unaccountably charming, too. Judith had no
eyes for it just then.

"This is silly. I ought not to have come. Who's that?"

"Nobody. Just a tree. Sit still. We'll go under the railroad bridge and
out over Grant's Hill. There won't be any more lights."

"It looked like some one."

"What do you care?"

"It looked like your cousin Maggie."

"She's at home in bed. She was tired to-night."

"Oh. Well, it looked like her. It was silly to come. I never shall come
again."

As if this were not a new threat, or had for some reason lost it terrors
to-night, the boy did not contradict her. They had left track and
railroad bridge behind now, darker blots against the surrounding dark,
with the lights of the station showing faintly far down the track. They
were passing the last of the houses that straggled along the
unfashionable quarter above the railroad track. Most of the houses here
were dark now. In the Nashs' windows the last light puffed suddenly out
as they went by.

Down in the town behind them other sleepy little lights were burning
faintly, or going out, but ahead of them the faintly moonlit road looked
wide-awake. It was an alluring road. It dipped into wooded hollows, it
broke suddenly into arbitrary curves and windings but found its way out
again, and kept on somehow, and gradually lifted itself higher and
higher toward the crest of the hill five miles away that you reached
without ever seeming to climb it, to be confronted all at once with the
only real view between Wells and Green River.

"I used to think Grant's Hill was the end of the world," said Judith
softly. "Maybe it is. It's funny I can say things like that to you, when
you only laugh and won't answer. Listen. Isn't it still, so still it
almost makes a noise."

It was very still. You could feel the pulse of the night here. There was
a whisper and stir of life in the rustling trees when the road crossed
some belt of woods; there was a look of blind, creeping life about the
clustering shadows in stretches of moonlight, and the low-hanging moon
above the dark fields they passed was a living thing, too, the most
alive of all. Judith stirred in her corner, and turned and looked at
it.

"It's sweet," she said. "And it's ours. It's still May. But we can't
wish on the moon now; it's too late. And I don't want to wish, I'm so
comfortable. Aren't you? Well, you needn't answer, then, and you needn't
hold my hand." She had felt for a hand that avoided hers. With a sleepy,
satisfied laugh, like a petted kitten purring, she settled herself
again, with her head against an unresponsive shoulder, and pulled an
unresponsive arm round her waist.

"You aren't as soft as the cushions--not nearly. You're pretty hard, but
I like you. I was afraid to come, but now----"

"Now what?"

"There's nothing to be afraid of. I'm so happy. There's nobody in the
world but you and me. Neil, I'm going to sleep."

"All right. Shut your eyes, then, and don't keep staring at me. What
makes your eyes so bright?"

[Illustration: "'_Shut your eyes_'"]

"You."

"Shut your eyes."

"All right. Nobody but you and me."

They were really alone in the world now, alone in the heart of the
night. Their little murmur of talk, so low that they could just hear it
themselves, had been such a tiny trickle of sound that it did not quite
break the silence, and now it had died away. Asleep or awake, the
girl was quite still, with her cheek pressed against the boy's shoulder,
and her long-lashed eyes tight shut. The horse carried them over the
moonlit road at a rate of speed that did not seem possible from its
strange, loping gait. The effect of it was uncanny.

Boy and girl and queer, high-shouldered horse, darkly silhouetted in the
moonlight, lost to sight in the shadows of tall trees that looked taller
in the dark, and then coming silently into view again, were like dim,
flitting shadows in the night; like peculiarly helpless and
insignificant shadows, restless and purposeless. The moon, soft and far
away and still, seemed more alive than they did, and more competent to
adjust their affairs.

They required adjusting. That was in the watching brightness of the
girl's eyes, fluttering open once or twice, only to close quickly again,
in the tenseness of the boy's arm around her, in the set of his
shoulders and lift of his stubborn young chin, in the very air that he
breathed uneasily, the soft, disturbing air of the May night. It was not
a boy and girl quarrel that was before them: it was something more. It
was the strangest hour that had come to them in their secret treasury of
strange hours that were touched with the glamour of black magic and
swayed by laws they did not know. It might be the darkest hour. It was
the test hour.

There is no sure and easy way through such hours. If they faced theirs
unprepared and afraid, so must the rest of the world, the part that is
older and counted wiser. But this could have been no comfort just then
to the boy and girl in the antiquated buggy, under the untroubled gaze
of the wishing moon.

They were almost on the crest of the hill now. One long, upward slant of
road led straight to it, bare of trees, and silvery in the moonlight. At
the foot, and just at the edge of a thick belt of woods, the boy pulled
up as if to rest his horse for the gradual ascent. At his left, hardly
visible at all to-night unless you stopped your horse to look for it, a
narrow and overgrown road led off through the trees. Tightening the arm
that held her cautiously, the boy looked down at the face against his
shoulder, the faint, half-smile on the lips, and the lightly closed
eyes.

The girl did not move. Her cap had slipped off, and one small, bare hand
clutched the fuzzy white thing tight, as a sleeping child's hand might
have closed on some favourite toy. Her hair showed silvery blond and
soft against his dark coat. With a quick, hungry motion, the boy dropped
his head and kissed it lightly. Then, gripping the reins with a
firmness that no present activity of the animal called for, he left
Green River's only noteworthy view without a backward glance, and turned
his horse into the road through the woods.

For the next few minutes he had no attention to spare for Judith,
suspiciously quiet in his arms. He could not see her face. It was black
dark under the trees, dark as if it had never been light. The track was
wider than it looked, but also rougher. The trees grew close. Branches
that he brushed aside sprinkled dew into his face. The buggy creaked out
vain protests and useless warnings. Finally moonlight showed at the end
of the black tunnel, and the horse, which had been encountering its
difficulties in resourceful silence, made a faint, snorting comment
which sounded relieved, and presently, with unexpected jauntiness, swung
into the road again.

It was technically a road, and it was the wreck of a very good road, but
it was not in much better shape than the track they had reached it by.
Aspiring amateurs had sketched it and camera fiends haunted it in their
day. It was Colonel Everard's favourite bridle path, which naturally
prevented repairs upon it. But before the railroad went through it had
been Green River's only link with a wider world. Now a better built but
more circuitous road had replaced it, designed for motoring. No motors
ever penetrated here, and few carriages. It was left to the ghosts of
ancient traffic, if they ventured here. The glancing moonlight under the
close-growing trees might have been full of them to-night.

But the boy was not looking for ghosts or interested in the history of
the road or its charm, as he hurried his high-shouldered horse along it,
still responding jauntily. He squared his chin more stubbornly than
ever, and muttered encouragingly to the horse, and reached for his
battered whip. Round this corner, beyond this milestone, the stage
drivers used to make up time when the mail was late. A generous mile of
almost level road curved ahead of Neil into the moonlight, a fairly
clean bit of going even now. Judith and Neil were on the old coaching
road to Wells.

Neil reached for his whip, but did not take it out of the socket. A
small hand closed over his. The head on his shoulder did not move, but
dark eyes, watchful and deliberate, opened and looked up at him quietly.

"Now," said a cool little voice, "you can take me home."

"You're awake?"

"Of course."

"Then why----"

"I waited to see where you were going, and what you were going to do,"
explained Judith simply. They were covering the banner stretch of road
at a rate the old stage drivers had never emulated. Judith pushed Neil's
arm away, and sat straight and looked at him. Her cheeks were gloriously
flushed with the quick motion, and her soft, tumbled hair had broken
into baby curls round her forehead, but her eyes were a woman's dark,
unforgiving eyes. Neil gave her one furtive glance, and looked away.

"I told you to take me home," she said.

He made a muttered reply, inarticulate, so that it would have been hard
to tell whether it was really addressed to Judith or the horse, and bent
forward over the reins.

The colour deepened in Judith's cheeks, her soft lips tightened into a
straight line that was like her mother's mouth. Her cool, unhurried
voice was like her mother's, too: "I knew when we started out I'd have
trouble with you. Now I don't intend to have any more. I don't want to
have to tell you again. Take me home."

She had adopted the tone which Green River's self-made gentlewomen like
Mrs. Theodore Burr mistakenly believed to be effective with servants.
The boy beside her gave no sign that it was effective with him. He spoke
softly to the horse again, and flicked at it coaxingly with the whip.

"Neil, I am sorry for you," Judith stated presently, with no sympathy
whatever in her judicial young voice. "I have been awfully good to you."

"Good!"

"Yes, good. I--had to be. Because I knew we didn't have much time. I
knew--this--would have to stop some day. I knew it and you knew it, too.
You always knew it. Well, I've been trying to tell you for a long time
that it had got to stop. I tried, but you wouldn't let me. We're both
getting older, too old for this, and I'm going away next year. And some
things have happened to me, just lately--last week--that made me think.
I've got to be careful. I've got to take care of myself. This has got to
stop now--to-night. I wanted to tell you so. That's why I came;
because----"

"I know why you came."

"Don't be cross. Be good, and turn round now, and take me home. Neil,
I'm not sorry, you know, for--anything. Ever since that first night at
the dance you've been so sweet to me. I'm not sorry. Are you?"

"No."

"How funny your voice sounds. Why don't you turn round?"

He had no explanation to offer. The buggy plunged faster through the
dark, and Judith braced herself in her corner.

"Neil, turn round. Don't you hear me?"

He gave no sign of hearing. The horse swung gallantly into a bit of road
where the stage drivers had never been in the habit of hurrying, a
tricky bit of road, with overhanging rocks jutting out just where you
might graze them at sudden turns, and with abrupt dips into precipitous
hollows. One stretched dark ahead of them now. Judith caught her breath
as they plunged into it, and clutched Neil's arm. He laughed shortly,
and did not shake off her hand. She pulled at his wrist and shook it.

"Upset us if you want to. We'd go together," he urged, with a logic not
to be questioned. "Together, and that suits me, Judy."

"Neil, turn round. Neil!" Judith's voice was shrill with sudden terror
repressed too long, but she struggled to make it steady and cold again,
in one last effort at control.

"Who do you think you are, Neil Donovan? I tell you to take me home."

He did not even turn to look at her. He was getting the horse down the
rocky slant of dimly lit road with a patience and concentration which
there was nobody to appreciate just then. Judith collapsed into her
corner. There was a faint sound of helpless crying from her, then
silence as she choked back the tears; silence, and an erect, stubborn
figure showing oppressively big and dark between Judith and the moon.

"Neil, I'm sorry.... Neil, I can't stand this," came a muffled voice.
"Please speak to me."

They were on level ground again, and the horse was disposed to make the
most of it. The boy pulled her into a jolting walk which was not the
most successful of her gaits, but represented a triumph for him just
now, and then he turned abruptly to Judith, gathering both her hands
into his free hand and gripping them tight.

"I'll talk to you now," he said. "It's time I told you. Judith, you and
I are not going back."




CHAPTER TWELVE


"What do you mean?"

"We're not going back," he repeated deliberately.

"We are!" flashed Judith.

"We're not going back. We're never going back."

Judith drew back and stared at him, her hands still in his, and the boy
stared back with a look that matched her own in his big, deeply lit,
dark eyes. White faces, with angry, dark eyes, were all that they could
see clearly, though they were crossing a patch of road where a ragged
gap in the trees let some of the moonlight through; white faces like
strangers' faces.

They were only a boy and girl jolting through the woods in the night in
a rattletrap buggy behind a caricature of a horse, but what looked out
of their angry eyes and spoke in their tense you

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