"There won't be any more of them. You needn't grudge it to me." Judith buried her face in the cushions, and lay very still.
"But the Colonel really arranged this for you. Dancing bores him. He said you ought to be amused."
"He didn't say so to me."
"Are you laughing? I thought you were crying a minute ago." Judith gave no further signs of either laughing or crying. "Judith, what does he say to you? When you went with him to look at that night-blooming flower with the queer name, last week, and were gone so long, what did he talk to you about? You heard me. Please answer."
"He's a stupid old thing."
"What did he talk about?"
"I don't remember."
"Judith," Judith's mother stood plucking ineffectively at her long gloves, and looking at the motionless white figure, very slender and childish against the chintz of the cushions, soft, tumbled hair, and hidden face, with a growing trouble in her eyes, "I ought to talk to you—I ought to tell you—you're old enough now—old enough——"
Judith turned with a soft, nestling movement, and opened her eyes again, deep, watchful eyes that asked endless questions, and made it impossible to answer them, eyes that knew no language but their own, the secret and alien language of youth. Her mother sighed.
"You're the strangest child. Sometimes you seem a hundred years old, and sometimes—you don't feel too badly to stay alone? Mollie would have stayed in with you, or Norah."