em. The eyes were lying to her. Neil was
not really wise or kind. He was cruel. He had hurt her and slighted her,
and she was through with him.

"Parks, can't you go faster?" she said suddenly, in her clear little
voice. "It's so late, and I'm hungry and cold."

"It's bad going through here, Miss," the chauffeur said.

They were turning into a narrow mile or so of road that sloped gradually
down through a series of arbitrary curves and bends to the lake and the
camp, a changed and elaborate structure now, overweighted with verandas
and uncompromisingly lit with new electric lights. But the road was one
of the things that the Colonel did not improve when he changed the
public camp into a private one. It was unchanged and unspoiled, a
mysterious wood road still, alluring now in the gloom.

Judith's own people were waiting for her there at the end of that road.
They were all the people she had. Willard and schooltime and playtime
were more than a year behind her; they were behind her forever. She
could never go back to them. She had never really been part of them. She
had forced herself into a place there, but she had lost it now, and it
could never be hers again.

These were her people. They were strange to her still, but she had grown
up breathing the feverish air that they breathed, and with little
whispers of hidden scandal about her. Judith was alone between two
worlds: one was closed to her, and she was before the door of another,
where she did not know her way. She was really alone, as she had told
Neil, more alone than she knew; a lonely and tragic figure, white and
small in the corner of the big car.

But she was not crying now. She dabbed expertly at her eyes with an
overscented scrap of handkerchief and sat up, looking eagerly down the
dark road. She could catch far echoes of a song through the still night
air, faint echoes only, but it was a song that she knew, a gay little
song, and it came from a place where people were always kind and gay. It
was like a hand stretched out to her through the dark, a warm hand, to
beckon her nearer, and then draw her close. She leaned forward and
listened and looked.

There was the camp, the first glimpse of it, though soon a dip of the
road would hide it again. It was an enchanting glimpse, a far,
low-lying flicker of light. And there, just by the big, upstanding
boulder where the road turned abruptly, she saw something else. She saw
it before Parks did, as if she had