her pale face. She was a woman who did
not look tired easily, but she was also a woman who could not afford to
look tired.

There was no appeal or charm about her pale face now, only a naked look
of hardness and strain. Her husband, staring straight ahead of him with
troubled eyes, and his weak, boyish mouth set in a hard, worried line,
spoke rapidly and disconnectedly not of Judith, or the Colonel's ominous
coldness to him, but of Mr. Brady.

"Maggie's a bad lot," he was explaining for approximately the fifth time
as they whirled into the drive and under their own dark windows. "She
always was. Everard isn't making away with the belle of Paddy Lane. Not
yet. He's not that far down. But that dope about old Neil Donovan----"

"Oh, Harry, hush," his wife said, "here we are. What do you care about
Brady?"

"Nothing," he whispered, his arm tightening round her as he lifted her
down. "I don't care about anything in the world but Judith."

"Neither do I. Not really," she said in a hurried, shaken voice that was
not like her own, "you believe that, don't you, Harry?"

He did not answer. Gathering up her skirts, she followed him silently to
the front of the house, single file along the narrow boardwalk, not yet
taken up for the summer, creaking loudly under their feet.

"Look," she whispered, catching at his arm. The front of the house was
dark except for two lights, a flickering lamp that was being carried
nearer to them through the hall, and a soft, shaded light that showed at
a bedroom window. The window was Judith's. He fumbled for his key, but
the door opened before them. Norah, her forbidding face more militant
than ever in the flickering light of the kerosene hand-lamp she held,
her white pompadour belligerently erect, and her brown eyes maliciously
alight, peered at them across the door chain, and then gingerly admitted
them.

"It's a sweet time of night to be coming home to the only child you've
got," she commented, "why do you take the trouble to come home at all?"

It was a characteristic greeting from her. If it had not been, Mrs.
Randall would not have resented it now. She clutched at the old woman's
unresponsive shoulder.

"Where is she?" she demanded breathlessly.

"Judith is it you mean?"

"Oh, yes."

"How should I know how she spends her evenings? At some of the girls'
to-night. Rena Drew's maybe. I don't know. It's a new thing for you to
care. She was late in, and it's no wonder I was worried.