people; a very peculiar effect. Since I
came here, I have learned to walk in my sleep." And seeing my look
of astonishment, "I walked in my sleep last night. And I took that
bit of doggerel out of my coat pocket, locked the closet door, and
replaced the key under my pillow."

"How strange! And where did you put it?" I wondered.

"Exactly: where did I put it?" repeated The Author, rumpling his
hair with both hands. "That's what I want to know, myself. I've
looked everywhere in my room, and in Johnson's, and I can't find
the thing. It's gone," and he stalked out, with his shoulders
hunched to his ears.

I sat still, staring out at the window. There was a thing I hadn't
told The Author, or even Alicia. I had no idea what the "bit of
doggerel" meant, if, indeed, it meant anything. But when I had held
Freeman Hynds's old diary in my hands, between the two pages
following the last entry had been a creased and soiled piece of
paper. I had seen it out of the tail of my eye, as the saying is. It
was only a glimpse, but one trained to handle many papers, as I had
been, has a quick and an accurate eye. And I knew that the paper
found by The Author in the attic, and now lost again, was the paper
I had seen in Freeman Hynds's diary.

CHAPTER IX

THE JUDGMENT OF SPRING

Judge Gatchell's nephews and nieces, brought by that punctilious
gentleman to call upon Miss Alicia Gaines, found her enchanting and
cried it to the circumambient air. It was as if the voice of April
had summoned the cohorts of Spring. For fresh-faced boys of a sudden
appeared in increasing numbers; and flower-faced girls came
fluttering into Hynds House like butterflies. They cared for its
history and its hatreds not a fig: what has April to do with last
November? The faith of Youth has a clearer-eyed wisdom, a sweeter,
sounder justice than the sourer verdict of the mature. For theirs is
the judgment of Spring. By this sign they conquer.

Susy Gatchell enlisted Mary Meade and Helen Fenwick, and these three
held all younger Hyndsville in the hollow of their pink palms. After
which, as Doctor Richard Geddes told me wrathfully, you "couldn't
put your foot down without running the risk of stepping on some
little cockerel trying to crow around Hynds House."

The tide was turning in our direction. Also, we were in daily
contact with really worth-while people, people that otherwise we
should have met only in books, magazines, and newspapers. And they
lik