She answered, "I have no fear of him." Drawing her gloves from her pocket, she tried to put them on, but her hands trembled visibly. She abandoned the attempt at concealment, and turned to him.
"It's just that I'm glad for you, George, and proud of you, and—I've been making an acknowledgment to myself, that's all. Now shall we go home?"
But he took her hand and kept her face toward the window. "I should like to hear that acknowledgment, if I may?"
Perhaps the colours deepened in the sky; at any rate, her cheeks grew rosier as she looked away from him, out above the roofs. "If you wish to know," she answered.
"I wish it very much."
She folded her hands before her tightly; they showed white against her dress. "No one else will hear," she began uncertainly, "although every one else heard your confession, George. I heard, and somehow you set me thinking of the time we met in the Golf Club, long ago, last April."
"Last April," he repeated, and added with meaning, "Long ago."
Her voice grew stronger. "I will tell you everything," she said. "You will see what a foolish girl I have been—how proud I was. We spoke then of the world, and you warned me of it; you said that it was very big, and strong, and merciless."
"I remember," Mather said.
"But I did not believe," Judith went on. "I thought that you—you had just lost this presidency, George—I thought that you were cowed. And I thought that I was braver than you, and stronger than you, and I believed that I—I, George!—could conquer the world!"