On an afternoon in June a year later than the interrupted party at the Everards' a young man sat at Mr. Theodore Burr's desk in Judge Saxon's outer office. It was still technically Mr. Burr's desk, but the young man looked entirely at home there. A litter of papers which that fastidious gentleman would never have permitted himself now covered it, and the air was faintly scented with the smoke of a cigarette widely popular in Green River, but not with devotees of twenty-five-cent cigars, like Mr. Burr. The bulky volume open on the desk was thumbed and used as Mr. Burr had never used any book that looked or was so heavy. The book was Thayer on Constitutional Law, and the young man dividing his attention between it and Main Street under his window flooded with June sunshine was Neil Donovan.

He divided his attention unequally, as Main Street late on that sunny afternoon might persuade the most studious of young men to do. The square was crowded—crowded, it is true, much as a busy street on the stage is crowded, where the same overworked set of supers pass and repass. The group of bareheaded girls now pacing slowly by arm in arm under the window were returning from what was approximately their fourth visit that afternoon to the post-office, the ice-cream parlours, the new gift shop and tea-room, or some kindred attraction. The Nashes' new touring car, driven by the prettiest girl in Willard's June house party, under the devoted instruction of Willard himself, was whirling through the shopping district for at least the third time.

However, it was an imposing pageant enough, though the boy at the window did not appear to find it so, regarding it with approving but grave eyes, and returning Mr. Nash's flourishing salute unsmilingly—a brave pageant of gay and flimsy gowns, of youth returning to the town, and movement and colour, and June fairly begun.

June so far was like other Junes in Green River. Colonel Everard and the season of social and political intrigues were here. Rallies in the town hall would soon begin. Men with big names in state politics would make speeches there, while the Colonel presided with his usual self-effacing charm, which did not advertise the known fact that he was a bigger power in the state than any of them. The good old question of prohibition was the chief issue, as usual; discreet representatives of the people would, according to a catch phrase at the capital, vote for prohibition, and then go round to the best hotel and get drunk; and discreet politicians, like the Colonel, would make money out of both these facts in their own way.

Behind the closed door of Judge Saxon's office low-keyed, monotonous voices were talking, and a secret conference was going on. Troubled times were here again for those deep in the Colonel's councils. They were never sure of a permanent place there, but always on the watch for one of his sudden changes of front, which threatened not only his enemies but his friends. But he had recovered and held their confidence before, and he could this year.

All scandals of the year before were decently hidden. Maggie Brady was missing and continued to be missing. By this time it was the general verdict that she had always been bound to come to a bad end, and Charlie Brady to drink himself to death. Nobody interrupted his attempts to do so. His drunken outburst of speech had echoed a growing sentiment in the town, but it grew slowly, for under its thin veneer of sophistication Green River was only a New England town still, conservative and slow to change.

Green River had not changed much in a year, but Neil Donovan's fortunes had. Nobody knew the full history of the change except Neil, but others could have thrown sidelights upon it, among them Mrs. Randall's second maid, Mollie. On the morning after that same party of the Colonel's, which Mr. Brady attended so unexpectedly, and Judith did not attend, Mollie opened the Randalls' door to an early caller.

Even in curl papers, she was usually too much for the young man now on the doorstep. He was in the habit of looking at his boots and addressing them instead of her, and Mollie quite understood that, for they were shabby boots. They looked shabbier than ever to-day, and so did his shiny coat, but his eyes were steady and clear, and there was clear colour in his cheeks, as if he had had the only restful and well-earned sleep in Green River.

"Miss Judith," he said.

"Not at home," said Mollie, in a manner successfully copied from French maids in the ten, twenty, thirties.

"Nonsense. Her curtains aren't up," replied the young man who was usually made speechless by it.

"She's asleep," conceded Mollie, in a manner more colloquial but also more forbidding. "She don't want to see you."

Mollie was incapable of interpreting Judith's wishes, but the young man was not; his smile conveyed this, though it was friendly enough. "When Miss Judith gets up, tell her——"

"I tell you she don't want to see you," snapped Mollie in a tone any French maid would have deplored. "She don't want to see anybody."

"Tell her that I'll call again at three this afternoon," directed the young man calmly, and completed his disturbing effect upon Mollie by turning and walking briskly away without a backward glance, and without his usual air of self-consciousness when her eyes were upon him. He carried his shabby coat with an air, and held his head high, and swung out of sight down the sleepy little street as if he were the only wide-awake thing in the whole sunny, sleepy town.

It was a disconcerting moment for Mollie or any lady properly conscious of her power, and sorry to see a sign of it disappear, even the humblest of signs. It would still have been disconcerting, if she could have foreseen that Judith would not receive this young man alone, either at three that afternoon, or for many afternoons. The young man was not overawed by Mollie. That was established once and for all. He would never be overawed by her again. She slammed the door rather viciously.

"Keep quiet there," said Norah, appearing inopportunely, as her habit was, with a heavily laden breakfast tray. "She needs her rest. But she's awake. She rang. You can take this up and leave it outside her door. Who was talking to you?"

"Well, I don't know what's come to him," Mollie complained. "Who does he think he is? Did anybody leave him a fortune over night? It was the Donovan boy."

A few minutes after Neil's encounter with Mollie, when Mr. Theodore Burr admitted him listlessly after his third knock at Judge Saxon's door, he could see no evidence that any one had left the Donovan boy a fortune over night, but did note a change in him. There was something appealingly grave and sedate about his face, as if a part of its youth, the freakish, unconquerable laughter of it, that had defied and antagonized Mr. Burr, were gone forever, burned away, somehow, in a night. It was a look Mr. Burr was to grow well used to in the next few months. Perhaps the unaccountable affection he was to feel for the boy in the course of them was born then and there.

Neil emerged from the Judge's private office after a briefer talk than usual, and the Judge did not escort him to the door in his accustomed, friendly fashion. Mr. Burr did, and made him clumsy and unwonted confidences there.

"The old man's not quite fit to-day," he said. "I ought to have told you. It's a poor time to get anything out of him. Been shut up there by himself doping out something. Won't say two words to me."

"Then he must be in a bad way, Theodore," said the boy, with the ghost of his old, mocking smile, which Mr. Burr somehow did not find annoying at all.

"Look here, Neil," he surprised himself by saying, "I like you. I always did. You deserve a square deal. You're too good for the Brady gang. You're too good for the town. If there was anything I could do for you——"

"Maybe there is, Theodore," the boy turned in the corridor to say. "Cheer up. You'll have a chance to see. I'm coming to work for the Judge, I start in next week."

"But the Judge turned you down." Mr. Burr's brain struggled with the problem, thinking out loud for the sake of greater clearness, but too evidently not achieving it. "The Judge likes you, too, but he couldn't take you in if he wanted to. He talked of it, but gave it up. He'd be afraid to. Everard——"

"I start in next week," repeated Mr. Donovan.

"But what did you say to him?" demanded Mr. Burr. "What did he say to you? How did you dare to ask him again?"

"I didn't ask him. Don't worry, Theodore. I haven't been trying any black magic on the Judge. I don't know any. Maybe I'll learn some. I'm going to learn a good deal. I've got to. Nobody knows how much. Even the Judge don't know. I'm coming to work for the Judge, that's all, but I didn't ask him." Mr. Burr, listening incredulously, did not know that this was a faithful if condensed account of his talk with the Judge and more, the key to much that was to happen to this pale and determined young man, the secret of all his success. He gave it away openly, and without pride:

"I just told him so."

Neil started in the next week. If Mr. Burr watched his young associate somewhat jealously at first in the natural belief that a boy who had changed the course of his life in a five-minute interview would do something equally spectacular next, and if the Judge, who had said to him at last, "Well, it's my bad morning, son, and your good morning, so you get your way, but you're climbing on a sinking ship, and remember I told you so. And I'll tell you something else. It will be poor pickings here for all of us, and I'm sorry, but I'm the sorriest for you," was inclined to follow him furtively over the top of his spectacles with a look that held all the pathetic apology of age to youth in his kind, near-sighted eyes, this was only at first.

Colonel Everard, returning a few weeks later from one of his sudden, unexplained absences from town, and making an early morning visit to his attorney, was admitted by a young man whom he recognized, but pretended not to.

"Who are you?" he inquired, "the office boy?"

"Just about that, sir," the young man admitted, as if he had no higher ambition, but the Judge, entering the room with more evidence of beginning the day with the strength that the day required, than he had been showing lately in his carriage and look, put a casual hand on the boy's shoulder, and kept it there.

"The last time we discussed enlarging my office force, you didn't advocate it, Everard," he said rather formally.

"So you aren't discussing it with me now?"

"Do you think you'd better discuss it?"

"Do you?"

"I think you are in no position to discuss it. You've been recently furnished with much more important material to discuss. I haven't seen you since your garden party, have I?"

"No." Both men seemed to have forgotten the boy's existence, but now the Colonel recalled it, and apparently without annoyance, and flashed a disarming smile at him, giving up gracefully, as he always did if he was forced to give up at all. "Well, you're right, Hugh. You're always right. Do as you please. But this boy's got a temper of his own and—quite a flow of speech. Runs in his family, evidently. Properly handled, these are assets, but——"

"I'm sorry, sir," Neil found himself stammering. "I shouldn't have spoken to you as I did that day. I'm sorry."

"Next time be sure of your facts." The voice was friendly, almost paternal, but it held an insidious challenge, too, and for one betraying moment all the native antagonism that was really there flashed in the Colonel's eyes. Few enemies of his had been permitted to see it so clearly. It was a triumph for Neil, if a barren one. "Be very sure."

"I will, sir," said Neil deliberately, but very courteously. Then the Colonel disappeared into the private office with his arm about his trusted attorney's shoulders, and the young man for whose sake his attorney had openly defied him for the first time in years began to empty the office waste-baskets.

The winter weeks in the Judge's office passed without even moments of repressed drama like this. There was little to prove that they were the most important weeks of his life to Neil. At first they were lonely weeks. Mr. Burr, unusually prompt, reached the office one crisp September morning in time to find him staring out of the window at a straggling procession passing on its way up the hill to the schoolhouse, hurrying on foot in excited groups, or crowded into equipages of varying sizes and degrees of elegance, properly theirs or pressed into service.

"First day of school," said Neil, and did not need to explain further, even to Mr. Burr. From to-day on new faces would look out of the many-paned windows of the old, white-painted building. New voices would sing in the night on their way home from barge rides and dances. There were to be new occupants of the seats of the mighty; a new crowd would own the town. The door of the country of the young was shut in this boy's face from to-day, and that is always a hard day, but it was peculiarly hard in Green River, where the country of the young was the only unspoiled and safe place to live. And there were signs of a private and more personal hurt in the boy's faraway eyes.

"What's that letter?" said Mr. Burr.

"Seed catalogue."

"Don't she write to you every day?"

"Who?"

"Is she too proud, or did she forget all about you? She'll have time to, away half the summer, and not coming home for vacations. She won't see you till next June."

"If you mean Judith Randall," her late class-mate replied in a carefully expressionless voice, "why should she write to me, and why shouldn't she forget all about me?" There was a faint, reminiscent light in his eyes, as if he were not seriously threatened with the prospect, but it died away quickly, and his face grew very grave.

"I'm a business man now, Theodore."

"You are," said his newest friend, "and we couldn't keep house without you now. You're in a class by yourself."

This was true. Neil did not take his big chance at life as other boys equally in need of it would have done. He did not lose his head. He showed no pride in it. Green River, soon seeing this, rewarded him in various ways, each significant in its own fashion. Nondescript groups round the stove in his uncle's little store ceased to look for signs that he felt superior to them, and welcomed him as before, restoring to him his privilege of listening to talk that was more important than it seemed, public sentiment uncoloured and without reserve, the real voice of the town. Mrs. Saxon, of the old aristocracy of the town, with inborn social prejudices stronger than any acquired from the Everards, broke all her rules and invited him to Sunday-night supper.

"The boy's not spoiled," his old friend Luther Ward said to the Judge approvingly. "He knows his place."

"That's the surest way to climb out of it," said Judge Saxon, advisedly, for it was the Judge who had the closest and most discerning eyes upon Neil Donovan's career. Listlessly at first, because he had looked on at too many uphill and losing fights against the world, but later with interest, forced from him almost against his will, he watched it grow.

To a casual observer the boy would have seemed to be fitting himself not for an ornament to the legal profession, but for the office boy Colonel Everard had called him, but he would have seemed a willing office boy. He spent hours uncomplainingly looking up obscure points of law for some purpose nobody explained to him. He devoted long, sunny afternoons to looking up titles connected with some mortgage loan which nobody gave him the details of, and he seemed satisfied with his occupation, and equally satisfied to devote a morning to plodding through new-fallen snow delivering invitations to some party of Mrs. Saxon's.

When he was actually studying, he lost himself in the Judge's out-of-date reference books, as if they contained some secret as vital as the elixir of youth, and might yield it at any moment. Mr. Burr, at first ridiculing pupil and course of instruction alike, and with some show of reason, began shamefacedly and afterward openly to give him what benefit he could from the more modern education which had been wasted upon him. Between his two teachers the boy arrived at conclusions of his own. Neil was studying law by the old method which evolved so many different men of letters and keen-witted lawyers, a method obsolete as the Judge's clothes, but Neil gave allegiance to it ardently, as if it had been invented for him.

"What do you get out of this?" the Judge demanded, coming upon Neil late one afternoon, poring over the uninspired pages of Mr. Thayer by the fading light. "What do you hope to get?"

"All there is in it," said the boy simply, and without oratorical intent.

"Suppose you do pass your bar examinations. What then? What will you do with it?"

"I'll wait and see then. I had to begin somewhere."

"Why?" said the Judge, and as he asked the question, the answer to it, which he had once known so well and forgotten, looked at him in the boy's pale face and glowing eyes, the great answer not to be silenced, youth, and the wonderful, wasteful urge of youth. "Don't you know this town's sick?" he demanded abruptly. "It's dirty. You can't clean it up. Don't you ever try. Don't you stir things up. Don't you dig in too deep. I suppose you know the town's got no room for you?"

"Yes, sir, I know."

"Where do you expect to end?" the Judge began irritably, "in the poorhouse? You're so damn young," he grumbled. "It's a good thing I didn't know you when I was young. I'd have listened to you then."

"You will now, sir," said the boy, and the Judge did not contradict him, but instead, under shy pretence of groping for the switch of the desk lamp, found the boy's hand and gripped it.

"You're a good boy," he remarked irrelevantly. "Mind what I said, and don't dig in too deep."

The Judge did not explain whose secrets he hoped to protect by this vague warning. Probably he could not have explained. It was one of those instinctive pronouncements which shape themselves in rare moments when two people are close and mean more than either of them know. Certainly if the key to any secret was to be found within the Judge's dingily decorated walls or in his battered safe, or learned from his partner, the boy had exceptional opportunities to unearth it. Theodore Burr's intimacy with Neil developed rapidly. He stuck to it obstinately, in spite of his wife, showing more independence about it than he had in years. The two had tramped and snow-shoed together through long winter hours of intimate talk and more intimate silence, and they found the first Mayflowers of the year together. Only the week before he had committed the crowning indiscretion of giving up a poker game at the Everards' to go shooting with Neil.

The Judge, in the strenuous days of Colonel Everard's summer campaign, had no time to observe the growth of this intimacy or to think much about Neil, but he might have been interested in a snatch of talk in the Brady kitchen one evening, if he could have overheard it, more interested than Mrs. Donovan, who did not remember it long.

Her son was an hour late for supper, but she was used to that, for now that he was on his feet the house revolved around him. She served him, and then sat watching him with her hands folded, and the new dignity that had come with his first bit of success straightening her tired shoulders, and the look of age and pain that had been growing there since Maggie disappeared widening her soft, deep eyes. He had dropped wearily into his chair, and he ate almost in silence, but she was used to that, too.

Outside the short, June twilight was over, and a pattering summer rain had begun to fall. Neil's dark hair was damp with it and clung to his forehead in close curls. Once, passing his chair, she smoothed it with a hand that was work hardened but finely made and could touch him lightly and shyly still. Her son pulled her suddenly close, and hid his face against her.

"What is it?" she asked, softly and not too soon as she stood still and held him. "What's wrong, then? Where have you been?"

"Nothing's wrong. Nothing new. I went round to Theodore Burr's, but I left there at five. I didn't mean to be late home or make work. But I had a hunch to look in at Halloran's. I thought I'd find Charlie there. I did, and I had to get him home."

"Taking your strength," said Mr. Brady's aunt, unfeelingly but truthfully, "a good-for-nothing——"

"That's not the worst thing he does."

"What is, then?"

"Talking."

"He don't mean anything by that."

"Sometimes he does. Sometimes he tells you things that you never suspected and you don't believe him at first, but you find they're true; things that have been locked up in his addled brain so long that they're out of date, and you don't know how to profit by them or handle them, but they're true—all true."

"Neil, you don't half know what you're saying. You're tired."

Mrs. Donovan released herself abruptly to get the tea-pot from the stove. Her son, who had been talking in a low, monotonous voice, more to himself than her, watched her with dazed eyes that slowly cleared.

"I guess you're right," he said. "I didn't mean to frighten you. Charlie was no more loose mouthed to-day than he always is. I got hold of nothing new, but I have hold of more than I can handle, and I'm tired and I'm scared, and there's only one of me."

But Mrs. Donovan preferred her own interpretation of the situation, as most ladies would have. She made it tactfully, keeping her eyes away from him, busy with the tea-pot. "You're young, and it's June. Neil, the children walked round with the Sullivan girl to take home the wash to the Randalls'. They had some talk with Norah there. Judith will be home this week."

She had mentioned the much-debated name in a voice which she kept indifferent, but she flashed a quick, apprehensive glance at him. She was quite unprepared for its effect upon him. He only laughed, and then his face sobered quickly, and his eyes grew lonely and tired again.

"Judith," he said, "you think that's my trouble, mother. Well, I'm not so young as I was last June." Then he began with considerable relish to drink his tea.

"You're contrary and close mouthed, but you're only a boy like all other boys," said Mrs. Donovan, sticking to her point, "and you're a good son to me."

The boy who had made this rare and abortive attempt at confidences only the night before showed no need of repeating it as he gazed out of the Judge's window. He looked quite competent to bear all his own troubles alone, and a generous share of other people's, though somewhat saddened by them. Perhaps his mother's diagnosis of him was correct. He leaned his chin on his hands and stared out of the window like any dreaming boy, as if it was. But the winter that had passed so lightly over Green River had left traces of its own upon him. His profile had a clearer, more sharply outlined look. The lines at the corners of his mouth were firmer though they were no deeper, and the mouth was still a boy's mouth, red-lipped and lightly closed. But the dreaming eyes were a man's, dreaming still, but alert, and ready to banish dreams.

The afternoon light was fading fast. It was not so easy now to read the fine print of Mr. Thayer's notes, and the boy made no further pretence of trying to. He let Mr. Thayer slip to the floor, and stretched himself in his chair with a sigh of relief. The sounds of talk in the Judge's room had grown fainter and more intermittent and finally ceased. The Judge, still deep in conference with them, had left with his guests by the private door. The boy was alone in the office.

Gradually, as he sat there, the bright pageant of the busy little street had dimmed. It made a softer and mellower picture, a blend of delicate colours in the slant mellow light, and it was not so busy now. There were fewer passers-by, and they hurried and did not loiter past. It was almost supper-time. Willard Nash, not joy riding now, but dispatched reluctantly alone on some emergency errand, flashed by in his car, and disappeared up Main Street.

Beyond the double row of shops the upper section of the street was empty. The maples, in full leaf now and delicately green, shadowed the upward slant of smooth road alluringly. Touched with golden afternoon light, and half hidden by the spreading green, the old, solidly built houses planted so heavily in the midst of their well-kept lawns had new and unguessed possibilities. Any one of them just then might have sheltered a fairy princess. The one that did was just within range of the boy's grave, patient eyes, a protruding porch, disproportionately enlarged and ugly, a sweep of vividly green lawn stripped bare of the graceful, dishevelled growth of lilac and syringa bushes that had graced it before Mrs. Randall's day.

Not from that house, but from somewhere beyond it, a car flashed into view and cut smoothly and quickly down through the street, almost deserted now. The boy followed it idly with his eyes. The low-built, graceful lines of it held them. It approached, and slowed down directly under the windows, and the boy leaned forward and looked.

It was stopping there. It was one of the Everard cars, as the trim lines and perfection of detail would have shown without the English chauffeur's familiar, supercilious face. The car had only one occupant, a slender young person in white. She slipped quickly out, and disappeared into the dingy entrance hall below.

She had not seen the boy at the window. He stood still now in his corner, and waited. The tap of her feet was light even on the old creaking stairs, but he heard. She knocked once and a second time, and then threw open the door impatiently, saw who was there, and stopped just inside the door, and looked at him.

Her white dress and big, beflowered hat looked as cool and as new as June itself. They did not make the dingy room look dingier, they made you forget it was dingy. Her soft, befrilled skirts fluffed and flared in the brave and bewildering mode of the moment. Skirts, small shoes that were built to dance, not to walk, the futuristic blend of flowers in her hat, and the girdle, unrelentingly high and futuristic of colour, too, that gave her waist an unbelievably slender look, were all in the dainty and sophisticated taste of a sophisticated young lady, and under the elaborate hat there was a sophisticated young face. It looked smaller and more faintly pink. The small chin was more prominent. But she still had the wide, reproachful eyes of a child. They regarded the boy unwinkingly. One hand went behind her, found the knob of the door, and closed it mechanically, but the eyes did not leave his face.

He stepped uncertainly forward, and stopped.

"Well, Judith," he said, in a voice that held all the authority Judge Saxon's assistant had acquired in the long year of his service and more, "Well?" and then, in a voice that held no authority at all, but was suddenly husky and small: "Oh, Judith, won't you speak to me?"