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:

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.