s 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 themsel