culate gasp of
excitement, she stepped out into the May night.

Colonel Everard had an ideal night for the little dance in his garden,
warm, but with a quiver of new life in the air. The May moon was in its
last quarter, but lanterns were to supplement it. But the Colonel's
guest of honour, pausing at the corner of Main Street and looking
sharply to left and right, and then turning quickly off it, found very
little light on the narrow and tree-fringed cross-street through which
she was hurrying now but the moon.

It hung slender and pale and low above the ragged row of little houses,
and seemed to go with her through the dark, but she took no notice of
its companionship. The street was deserted, and the tap of her little
heels sounded disconcertingly loud in the emptiness of it as she hurried
on, turning from the narrow street into a narrower one.

This street had only one real end; pending the appropriation needed to
carry it straight through, witheld by agencies which could only be
connected by guess with Colonel Everard, it led feebly past a few houses
which were nearly all untenanted and looked peculiarly so to-night, to a
clump of alders at the edge of an unpenetrated wood lot, where it had
paused. Just in front of it the girl paused, too.

Her small, white-coated figure was only dimly to be seen in the dark of
the street; the group in the shadow of the trees was harder to see, but
it moved; a horse pawed the ground impatiently, the boy in the buggy
leaned forward and spoke to him. Then Judith started uncertainly toward
him, and spoke softly, in the arrogant phrasing of lovers, to whom there
is only one "you" in the world:

"Is that you?"

"Is it you?" the boy's voice came hoarse through the dark. "I thought
you weren't coming. I waited an hour for you yesterday on the Rock."

"I couldn't help it. I oughn't to be here now, and I almost didn't come,
but I thought we'd have to-night. Neil, you hurt my hand. Be nice to
me."

She was standing close beside him now, and they could see each other's
faces, white and strange in the dark, but the boy's looked whiter, and
his breath came oddly, in irregular gasps. He held both her hands in
his, but he did not bend down to her, nor kiss her.

"What makes you look so queer? I don't like you. Be nice to me." There
was something terribly wrong with the smug little phrases, or with any
words at all just then, there in the heart of the silent dark, and
facing the strange