u 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Willard, forgetting himself in the heat of debate, had withdrawn his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