"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."