“DRYAD, IT’S ALL RIGHT––IT’S ALWAYS BEEN ALL RIGHT––WITH US!
THEY LIED––THEY LIED AND THEY KNEW THEY WERE LYING!”
“Size never made any difference to him?” he repeated the Judge’s word aloud, with a drawling interrogation. “Size never made any difference to him?”
He laughed again, softly, as if there were a newly discovered humor about it all which must be jealously guarded.
“It never had to make any difference,” the drawling voice went on, “it didn’t have to––because Jed Conway was always the biggest boy in the school!”
His nostrils were dilating, twitching with the thin, sharp odor of the overturned demijohn which was rising and thickening in the room. His eyes fell and for the first time became conscious of it lying there at his feet. And he stooped and picked it up, lifting it between both hands until it was level with his face––until it was held at arm’s length high above his head. Then his whole body snapped forward and the glass from the broken window pane jingled musically on the floor as the jug crashed out into the night.
Young Denny stood and smiled, one side of his chin a gash of crimson against the dead white of his face. Again he lifted his fists.
“He never whipped me,” he challenged the lights in the hollow, “he never whipped me––and he never 86 tried but once! I––I––ain’t never been––whipped––yet!”
There had been no sound to herald her coming as she darted up to the door. Reeling giddily there in the middle of the room, he had not even heard the one low cry that she choked back as she stopped at the threshold, but he half turned that moment and met the benumbed horror of Dryad Anderson’s eyes. Minute after minute he merely stood and stared back at her stupidly, while bit by bit every detail of her transformation began to penetrate his brain, still foggy with the force of the blow that had laid his chin wide open. Her tumbled hair was piled high upon her head; she was almost tall with the added height of the high-heeled satin slippers; more slender than ever in the bespangled clinging black skirt and sleeveless scarlet waist which the old cloak, slipping unheeded from her shoulders, had disclosed.