nd 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 w