more appointment to keep. He was late for it already. He glanced at the
town clock and started off hurriedly to keep it.

Back of Court-house Hill another street, starting parallel to Court
Street, rapidly loses its sense of direction and its original character
of a business street, wavers to right and left, past a scatter of
discouraged looking houses, and finally slants off in the general
direction of the woods at the edge of the town, and the abortive,
sparsely wooded hill known to generations of picnickers--not the elite
of the town, but humbler, more rowdy picnickers--as Mountain Rock.

The street never reaches it, but loses itself in a grubby tangle of
smaller streets, thickly set with small houses, densely and untidily
populated, the section known at first derisively and later in good faith
as Paddy Lane. Through the intricate geography of this quarter Colonel
Everard's only openly declared enemy might have been seen making a hasty
and expert way ten minutes later; quickly and directly as it permitted
him to, he approached the base of the hill.

Disregarding more public and usual ways of ascent, he struck straight
across a stubbly field that lay behind a row of peculiarly forlorn and
tumbledown houses into a path so narrow that it was hard to see until
you were actually looking down it, between the twin birches that marked
the entrance. He followed it to the base of the cliff itself. The belt
of stunted birches and dusty-looking alders that skirted the cliff was
broken by an occasional scraggly pine. The boy stopped under one of
them, leaned against the decaying trunk, produced a letter, and read it.

It was only a pencilled scrawl of a letter, on the roughest of copy
paper, and so crumpled that he must have been quite familiar with it,
but he read it intently.

"Neil," it ran, "I'll meet you Saturday, on top of Mountain Rock,
same time and place. I shan't see you till then. I don't want to.
You frightened me last night. I don't like you lately. Be nice to
me Saturday. JUDITH."

Only a pencilled scrawl, but he knew every word of it by heart, and of
the burst of excited speech in the Judge's office nothing remained in
his mind but the general impression that he had made a fool of himself
there. Perhaps he was too familiar with Judith's letter, for the sting
he had found there at first was gone from the words. He looked at them
dully.

"I can't stand much more," he said aloud.

He said