et rid of me.
And you're acting nervous."

"I'm not. I'm just sleepy."

Norah, her grimmest self, as she always was just before relenting, began
to fumble with her hat-pins.

"Let me help, if you really want to take off your hat. You'll spoil your
beautiful roses. Darling, you look like your niece, the lovely Miss
Maggie Brady, in that hat. Don't take it off. You're cross because you
know where I've been. Well, they didn't eat me. I'm all here. It was
Willard who came, and I don't care whether you tell me or not. And I
don't want to get rid of you. And I love you and you love me, and you're
not cross now."

"If I love you, you've got need of it, then." Norah struggled
perfunctorily, and permitted herself to be kissed. "Alone here till all
hours of the night, and Mollie at the dance at the Falls, and your own
mother----"

"But you won't worry about me? And you'll go? And you'll go now, before
it gets later, so you won't be frightened. You'll go this minute?
And--oh, Nana----"

Norah, departing by the front door because the back one was secured by
an elaborate system of locks of her own invention, and operated only by
herself, turned to give Judith a farewell glance of grim adoration.

"Nana, was it Willard that came?"

"Yes."

"And not--anybody else?"

"No."

Norah, winding herself tightly into the cape in a way that converted
that traditionally graceful garment into a kind of armour, disappeared
up the street. When she was out of sight, and not until then, Judith
slammed the door shut, laughing her tense, excited laugh again.

Then, for a sleepy young woman, she began to display surprising
activity. First she turned off all the lights in the hall but one, in an
opalescent globe, over the front door, looked at the faintly lighted
vestibule with a calculating eye, and turned that out also. She looked
critically in at the library, close curtained for the night, and dimly
lit by the embers of the wood fire, raked apart, but not dead. She
pushed them together expertly, and added a stick, a little one, which
would soon burn down to picturesque embers, like the rest. She pulled an
armchair closer to the fire, pushed it away again, and dropped two
cushions on the hearth with a discreet space between.

The remains of Willard's last half-dozen carnations and a box of the
eighty-cent-a-pound candy which only Mr. Edward Ward was extravagant
enough to prefer to the generally popular fifty-cent Belle Isle, were
con