Neil turned into Post-office Square just on the stroke of four. The square was as empty and strange to the eye as his mother's kitchen, though this was the rush hour of the day in that business centre upon ordinary days, when the fair had not emptied the town.

A solitary Ford of prehistoric make stood before the post-office, and even that was just cranking up. It lurched dispiritedly off, leaving a cloud of dust behind. A dejected-looking group of children hung about the door of the ice-cream parlour, and appeared to lack the initiative to enter in. Half the shops were shut. In the big show-window of the central section of Ward's Emporium Luther Ward, usually on parade and magnificently in charge of his shop and his staff of employees at this time of day, stood in his shirt sleeves, embracing an abnormally slender lady in a mauve velveteen tailored suit.

At first glance he seemed to be instructing her in the latest dance steps, but on a nearer view the visible part of her proved to be wax, and the suit was ticketed nineteen-fifty. He jerked her into place, turned and saw Neil, and hailed him cheerfully, waving him round to the main entrance door, where he joined him, still wiping his brow.

"If you want a thing well done, do it yourself," he said, explaining his late exertions with the air of believing the explanation was original with him and did credit to his intellect. "What are you here for, brother? Isn't Madison good enough for you?"

"No," Neil said. "Not with the big race called off."

"Called off? How's that?"

"Because you weren't there, Luther."

Mr. Ward gave a gratified laugh at this graceful compliment, and descended to facts.

"I'm too old for horse racing. It's my boy's turn. He went over with Willard Nash's crowd to-day. Why didn't you?" Mr. Ward demanded severely.

"Oh, Willard asked me all right. He's quite strong for me now." Mr. Ward had doubted this, being on the watch for slights to Neil and resenting them, though he never made an effort to prevent them. This was the usual attitude of Neil's more influential friends.

"Willard's a shrimp," said Mr. Ward gruffly. "And I like you," he added in a burst of frankness. "I always did like you, Neil. You've pulled yourself up by your boot-straps, and I hope you hang on to them tight. There's nobody better pleased than I am. Oh, I got a rig and sent all the help from the store over to the fair to-day," he added, turning quickly to impersonal subjects.

"You always do treat them right."

"Well, this wasn't my idea. I got it from the Colonel." A look of harmless but plainly evident pride came into Mr. Ward's open and ruddy countenance as he mentioned the great man's name. It was only the week before that he had received his first dinner invitation from the Everards. It came at the eleventh hour and did not include his wife, but he was dazzled by it still. "You know what he's doing? Closing his house, practically, for all three days of the fair, and sending all the help on the place over there—two touring cars full. It's a fine thing for them. They're high-class help and don't have it any too interesting down here. Anybody that says he's not democratic don't know the Colonel. This town don't half know him yet."

"You're right," Neil put in softly.

"Democratic," declaimed Mr. Ward, "and public spirited. Look at the fountain he's going to put up in the square. Look at the old Grant house going to be fitted up for a library. Look at him running for mayor, when he's been turning down chances at bigger offices for years—willing to stay here and serve for the good of the town. There's talk against him more than ever this year. I know that. It amounts to an indignation meeting when the boys get together at Halloran's. Well, failures hate a successful man, and their talk don't count. It will die down. But I hate to hear of it. For the Colonel's put this town on the map. He's not perfect, but who is? And suppose he does have a good time his own way? We've got a right to—all of us. It's a free country."

Mr. Ward delivered this last sentiment with touching faith in its force and freshness, and waved a plump hand of invitation toward the little private office back of the main section of his store, where he had developed his unfailing eloquence of speech upon subjects of public interest, and liked best to practise it. But Neil, himself listened to with growing deference by the groups that forgathered there, was not to be lured to that sanctum to-day. Speaking hastily and vaguely of work to be done, he escaped from his good friend and across the street to Judge Saxon's office.

He climbed the stairs heavily, and did not linger before the door to picture the sign changed to "Saxon, Burr, and Donovan," as he had done more times than he cared to admit. The office was not a thing to be proud of as a step up in life for him to-day; it was a place to be alone in, as men feel alone and safe in the place that is their own because they have worked there.

Showing this in every move, Neil locked the door, threw off his cap, and dropped into the broken-springed chair at the desk that was nominally Theodore Burr's, but really his. He groped mechanically for the handle of the drawer where he usually rested his feet, found it hard to open, gave up the attempt and, leaning back without its support, stared at Mr. Burr's ornate, brass-mounted blotter with unseeing eyes.

Sitting there, he was no longer the boy who had the privilege of intimate talk with prominent citizens like Mr. Ward and valued it; or the boy who had laughed at his mother's anxiety so bravely. He was not even the boy that he used to be, sullen, but rebellious, too. To-day for the first time he was something worse, a defeated boy. The long minutes dragged like hours, and he sat through them as he would have sat through hours, silent and motionless, losing run of time and acknowledging defeat.

For there was something that this boy wanted, and had always wanted, as he could never want other things, even success or love, as a boy or a man can want one thing only in one lifetime. It was a remote and preposterous dream that he had, a dream that nobody else in Green River was foolhardy enough to cherish long, but this boy belonged to the race of poets and dreamers, the race that must sometimes dream true, because it always dreams. His dream had taken different forms: sometimes he saw himself doing desperate things, setting fire to a house that he knew and hated, striking a blow in the dark for which nobody thanked him, but the issue was always the same, and the dream never left him. He was to find Green River a new master. He was to save the town. That was his dream. It had never left him till now.

He was only a lean, tense boy, crouched over a battered desk and staring out of the window at a country street with absent, beautiful eyes, but he was living through a tragic hour; the terrible hour that poets and dreamers know when they lose hold upon their dreams. Measured by minutes, this hour was not long. Neil passed a hand across his forehead and sat up, reaching for his cap in a dazed way, for he was not to be permitted to hide longer from his trouble here. The plump and personable figure of Mr. Theodore Burr was crossing the square and disappearing into the door below. His unhurried step climbed the stairs. Neil opened the door to him.

"Hello, stranger. Why aren't you at Madison?" Neil said.

"I didn't go," said Mr. Burr lucidly. "Where are you going? I don't want to drive you away from here."

"Oh, just out. I was going anyway."

"You don't invite me. I don't blame you. I'm poor company, and I've got business to attend to here."

"No!"

"Why shouldn't I have business here?" snapped Mr. Burr.

"You should, you should, Theodore. Say"—the question had been troubling Neil subconsciously all the time he sat at the desk—"what's wrong with that lower drawer? I can't open it."

"It's locked."

"What for?"

"That," said Mr. Burr with dignity, "is my private drawer—for private papers."

"Papers!" Mr. Burr's private papers were known to consist chiefly of a file of receipted bills and a larger file of unreceipted bills, both kept with his usual fastidious neatness. "What papers?"

"That's my business. I've got some rights here, if I am a figurehead. I've got some privileges."

"Sure. Don't you feel right to-day, Theodore?"

"That," said Mr. Burr, "is my business, too."

Neil stared at his friend. Mr. Burr was faultlessly groomed, as always, his tie was of the vivid and unique blue that he affected so often, and a very recent close shave had acted upon him as usual, giving him a pink and new-born appearance, but his eyes looked old and tired, as if he had not slept for weeks and had no immediate prospect of sleeping, and there were lines of strain about his weak mouth. He was not himself. Even a boy preoccupied with his own troubles could not ignore it.

"Don't you feel right?" Neil said. "Don't you want me to do something, Theodore?"

"Yes. Get out of here. Leave me alone," Mr. Burr snapped angrily.

"Sure," said Neil soothingly.

Suddenly Mr. Burr gripped Neil's reluctant, shy, boy's hand, kept it in his for a minute in silence, and then abruptly let it go, pushing Neil toward the door.

"Don't begrudge me one locked drawer when you'll own the whole place some day," he said, with all the dignity that his fretful burst of irritation had lacked. "I'd like to see that day. You're a good boy, Donovan."

"You're not right. You've got a grouch. Come with me and walk it off," Neil said uneasily, but he did not press the invitation, and his friend had little more to say. His silence was perhaps the most unusual thing about his behaviour, which was all out of key to-day. Neil remembered afterward that just as he closed the door upon Mr. Burr and his vagaries, shutting them at the same time out of his mind, Mr. Burr, sitting rather heavily down in the broken-springed desk chair, was bending and stretching out a faultlessly manicured, slightly unsteady hand toward the locked drawer of the desk.

Neil stepped out into the street with a cautious eye upon the Emporium across the way, but no portly form was in sight there now, and no hearty voice hailed him. He crossed the square and turned north, walking quickly, soon leaving the larger houses behind, and then the smaller houses above the railroad track, always climbing gradually as he walked. Finally, at the entrance to an overgrown road that led off to his left, and at the highest point of his long and slow ascent, he turned and looked back at the town.

The town that Colonel Everard had put on the map hardly deserved the honour, seen so in a glitter of afternoon light, with the long, sloping hill leading down to it, and the white tower of the church pointing high above it, a cozy huddle of houses at the foot of the hill. It looked unassuming and sheltered and safe, only a group of homes to make a simple and sheltered home in. The boy looked long at it, then turned abruptly and plunged into the road before him.

It led straight across a shallow belt of fields and deep into the woods. Only a cart-track at first, it soon lost itself here in a path, and the path in turn grew fainter and became a brown, alluring ghost of a path. It was hard to trace, but this was ground that Neil knew, a favourite haunt of his, though few other boys ventured to trespass here. The woods were part of the Everard estate.

Neil had found his first May flowers here on the first spring that he was privileged to give them to Judith. Last year she had helped him look for them here. His errand here was not so pleasant to-day. The brown path did not really lead to the heart of the woods as it seemed to. It was not so long as it looked. It was a fairly direct short cut to the Everard house.

The boy followed it quickly, with no eyes for the dim lure of the woods to-day.

"You've beat me," he muttered once to himself; "I'll have a look at you."

Soon the woods were not so thick. They fell away around him, carelessly thinned at first, littered with fallen trees and stumps, but nearer the house combed out accurately by the relentless processes of landscape gardening, and looking orderly and empty. The little path vanished entirely here. Ahead of Neil, through a thin fringe of trees, was the Colonel's rose garden; beyond it, the broad stretch of lawn and the house, bulky and towered and tall.

Neil broke through the trees and stood and looked at it, straight ahead, seen through the frame of the trellised entrance to the garden, upstanding and ugly and arrogant.

"You've beat me," he said to the Colonel's house. "You've beat me; you and him. I hate you!"

His voice had a hollow sound in the empty garden. Garden and lawn and house had the same look that the whole deserted town had caught to-day; the look of suddenly empty rooms where much life has been, a breathless strangeness that holds echoes of what has happened there, and even hints of what is to happen; haunted rooms. It is not best to linger there. Neil turned uneasily toward the path again.

He turned, then he turned back, stood for a tense minute listening, then broke through the rose garden and began to run across the lawn. Very faint and small, so that he could not tell whether it was in a man's voice or a woman's, but echoing clearly across the deserted garden, he had heard a scream from the house.

It came from the house somewhere, though as Neil ran toward it the house still looked tenantless. The veranda was without its usual gay litter of cushions and books and serving trays. At the long windows that opened on it all the curtains were close drawn—or at all but one.

As Neil reached the house he saw that the middle window was thrown high and the long, pale-coloured curtain was dragged from its rod and dangling over the sill. Just then he heard a second scream from the house. It was so choked and faint that he barely heard it. Neil ran up the steps and slipped through the open window into the Everards' library.

Little light came through the curtained windows. The green room, sparsely scattered with furniture in summer covers of light chintz that glimmered pale and forbidding, looked twice its unfriendly length in the gloom. There was a heavy, dead scent of too many flowers in the air. On a table across the room a bowl of hothouse hyacinths, just overturned, crushed the flowers with its weight and dripped water into the sodden rug.

Neil, at the window looking uncertainly into the half-dark room, saw the bowl and the white mass of crushed flowers, and then something else, something that shifted and stirred in a far corner of the room. He saw it dimly at first, a dark, struggling group. There were two men in it.

One was a man who had screamed, but he was not screaming now. It would hardly have been convenient for him to scream, for the other, the smaller and slighter man of the two, was clutching him by the throat, gripping it with a hand that he could not shake off as the two figures swayed back and forth.

"Who's there?" Neil cried.

Nobody answered him. Nobody needed to, for just then the two men who seemed to be fighting swung into the narrow strip of light before the uncurtained window and he could see their faces. He could see, too, that they were not fighting now, though they had seemed to be. The bigger man was choked into submission already. No sound came from him and he hung limp and still in the little man's hold. Just in the centre of the strip of light the little man relaxed his grip, and let him fall. He dropped to the floor in a limp, untidy looking heap, and lay still there, with the light full on his face, closed eyes and grinning mouth. The man was Colonel Everard, the man who stood over him was Charlie Brady.

As Neil looked Brady dropped on his knees beside the Colonel, felt for his heart, and found it. He knelt there, motionless, holding his hand pressed over it and peering intently into his face. Presently he got to his feet deliberately, gave a deep sigh of entire content with himself, and looked about him. Then and not until then he saw Neil. He saw him without surprise, if without much pleasure, it appeared.

"You're late," he remarked.

"You drunken fool," Neil began furiously, then stopped, staring at his cousin. Whatever the meaning of this exhibition was, Charlie was not drunk. The excitement that possessed him was excitement of some other kind. It possessed him entirely, though it was under control for the moment. His muscles twitched with it. His shoulders shifted restlessly. His hands closed and unclosed. His eyes were strangely lit, and there was an absent, exalted look about them. Whatever the excitement, it was strong—stronger than Charlie. Neil, his eyes now used to the half-light, could see no weapon in the room, dropped on the floor or discarded. Mr. Brady, normally a coward in his cups and out of them, had attacked his enemy with his bare hands.

"Charlie, what's got you?" Neil said. "What's come to you?"

"What's come to him, there?" Charlie said, in a voice that was changed, too, and was as remote and as strange as his eyes, a low voice, with the deceptive, terrible calm of gathering hysteria about it.

"Look what's come to him," the voice went on. "Don't he deserve it, and worse? How did I find him to-day when I broke in through the window there? At his old tricks again. There was a woman with him in the library there, when he came out to me. He locked the door. She's there now. Neil, you'd better get away from here. I don't know what you're doing here, but you'd better go, and go quick."

He had given this advice indifferently. He made his next observation indifferently, too, with his furtive, absent eyes on the library door.

"I've killed him."

"What's got you? Are you crazy?"

"No—not now. You'd better go. I want to take a look in there first. The key's in the door."

"Charlie, come back here."

The note of command that he was used to responding to in his young cousin's voice reached and controlled Mr. Brady even now; he obeyed and swung round and stood still, looking at Neil. Neil's dark eyes, just above the level of his own, and so like them, were unrecognizable now. They were dull with anger, and they were angry with him.

"What's the matter?" he quavered. "What's the matter, Neil?"

Between the two cousins, as they stood facing each other, the Colonel lay ominously still. The cruel eyes did not open, and the distorted mouth did not change.

"Look! You can see for yourself. Feel his heart," Mr. Brady offered, but his cousin's dark, disconcerting eyes did not leave his face. "What's the matter, Neil? What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to make you talk out to me," Neil said. "You'll tell me what's got you, and why you did this, which will be the ruin of you and me, too, but first you'll tell me something else. You'll tell me what you've hid from me for a year, you who can tell me the truth when you're drunk and lie out of it when you're sober, till you've worn me out and I'm sick of trying to get the truth from you. I'll be getting it now too late, but I'll get it. Have you or have you not been living on this man's money?"

"Yes."

"Was it hush money?"

"Yes," Mr. Brady said. "Neil, I'll tell you everything. You've guessed most of it, but I'll tell you the rest. I can prove it. I can prove everything I know. I did take hush money. It was dirty money, but I didn't care. I didn't care what happened. I didn't care till to-day."

"To-day?"

"I got—a letter."

"Go on," Neil said.

As he spoke Mr. Brady's face began suddenly to change, lighting again with that strange excitement which had gripped him, revived, and burning through its thin veneer of control. His eyes blazed with it, and his voice shook with it. He waved a trembling hand toward the library door. A sound had come from the library, the faintest of sounds, a low, frightened cry. It was like the ghost of a cry, but he heard. Neil heard it, too, and was at the door before him, trying to unlock it, fumbling with the key.

"She's there yet," Mr. Brady cried; "whoever she is. Well, she'll be the last of them. I had a letter, I tell you, a letter from Maggie. She's coming home, what's left of her—what he's left of her—Everard. I never thought he was to blame. I said he was, but I was talked out of it. If I'd thought so, if I'd suspected it, would I have touched a penny of his dirty money? But she's coming home. Maggie's coming home."

For the moment Neil was not concerned with the fact. Graver revelations might have passed over him unheeded. The key had turned at last. Then Neil felt the door being pushed open from inside. He stepped back and waited. The door opened cautiously for an inch or two, then swung suddenly wide. Standing motionless, framed in the library door, was Judith.