side of the hedge looked far away,
with the dark sweep of lawn between. It was a night for the fairies, or
for the girl and boy, and that was quite as it should be, for it was
their first together for months.

Judith and Neil sat discreetly erect on the steps, undoing what those
months apart had done with little bursts of shy speech, and long, shy
silences that helped them more. In the longest and shyest silence their
hands had groped for each other once, met as if they had never touched
before, and clung together for a minute as if they never meant to let
go, but Judith kept firmly to impersonal subjects still.

"You did it all," she said. "Things do happen so fast when they happen.
Just think, this time last year he was like a king!"

"Everard?"

"Yes. Do you remember how I used to be cross when you called him that,
and wouldn't say Colonel? How childish that was!" Judith patronized her
dead self, as a young lady may, with her twentieth birthday almost upon
her.

"You weren't childish."

"What was I?"

"Just what you are now."

"What's that?"

"Wonderful." Neil chose his one adequate word, from the tiny vocabulary
of youth, small because few words are worthy to voice the infinite
dreams of it. "Wonderful."

"No, I'm not wonderful. You are. That dreadful old man, and every one
knew he was dreadful and wouldn't do anything about it till you----"

"Bawled him out? That's all I did, you know, really. It was a kid's
trick. He lost out because it was coming to him anyway. Poor Theodore
saw to that. He turned the town against Everard when he killed himself.
It wasn't turning fast, but it was turning. I did give it a shove and
make it turn faster, but I didn't even have sense enough to know I had
until the day after the rally, when the Judge sent for me and told me. I
didn't dare go near him until he sent for me, and I thought he had sent
for me to fire me."

"But you broke up the rally. They were dead still in the hall until you
left, and then they went crazy, calling for you, and all talking at
once, talking against you, some of them, till it really wasn't a rally
any more, but just like a mob. Oh, I know. The Judge tells me, every
time I go to ride with him, and when he came on to the school last
winter and saw me there, he told me all over again. Father has never
half told me. He hates to talk about the rally or the Colonel either,
but I don't care, he and mother are both so sweet to me lately--just
sweet