m to finish, and as she waited and smiled, he had suddenly nothing
more to say. Judith was so slender and white and still as she stood
there. All the outraged dignity of an offended schoolgirl was helping to
make this overwhelming little effect of hers, and every trick of poise
and carriage that she had acquired in a year, and something else,
something that shamed and silenced the boy as no tricks could have done,
and made her pathetic little show of injured dignity real. A woman's shy
soul was reaching out for every defence it had to protect itself; a
woman's new-born, bewildered soul looked out of Judith's beautiful,
grieved eyes.

It was very still in the office. Outside an automobile horn sounded
aggressively, once and again, and Judith gave the boy an amused,
apologetic glance.

"Parks is in a hurry," she said. "He ought not to do that. The Colonel
wouldn't like it. But I won't keep him waiting. I'm going out to the
Camp for supper. Father and mother are there already. I stopped for the
Judge, but he doesn't seem to be here. He is walking out to the Camp, I
suppose. I'm--glad to have seen you." Her voice choked perilously over
this irreproachable sentiment, then steadied and modulated itself
according to the instructions of the highly accredited elocution teacher
of which she had enjoyed the benefit for a year. "Good-night."

Again she put out her cool little hand, but this time the boy's hand
closed on it tight.

"Judith," he began, his words coming fast, the contact seeming to
release all that had been storing itself up in his lonely heart for a
year. Once released, it came tumbling out incoherently, with the lilting
brogue of the ragged little boy that he used to be singing through it,
and the breathless catch in his voice that is the supremest eloquence
for the kind of words that he had to say. But Judith gave no sign of
being moved by it, and while she listened, a hard look, too unrelenting
for any eloquence to reach, was growing in her eyes.

"Judith, you're so sweet, so sweet; sweeter than you were last
year--sweeter than you ever were before. I didn't know anybody could be
sweeter, even you. I was so lonely. I wanted you so, and now you've
come. Everything will be all right, now you've come. And you came
straight here. You knew I was here, and you came because you knew. You
came straight to me."

"I came for the Judge," she corrected him gravely.

"But you knew I was here."

"I knew you were worki