"This is silly. I ought not to have come. Who's that?"
"Nobody. Just a tree. Sit still. We'll go under the railroad bridge and out over Grant's Hill. There won't be any more lights."
"It looked like some one."
"What do you care?"
"It looked like your cousin Maggie."
"She's at home in bed. She was tired to-night."
"Oh. Well, it looked like her. It was silly to come. I never shall come again."
As if this were not a new threat, or had for some reason lost it terrors to-night, the boy did not contradict her. They had left track and railroad bridge behind now, darker blots against the surrounding dark, with the lights of the station showing faintly far down the track. They were passing the last of the houses that straggled along the unfashionable quarter above the railroad track. Most of the houses here were dark now. In the Nashs' windows the last light puffed suddenly out as they went by.
Down in the town behind them other sleepy little lights were burning faintly, or going out, but ahead of them the faintly moonlit road looked wide-awake. It was an alluring road. It dipped into wooded hollows, it broke suddenly into arbitrary curves and windings but found its way out again, and kept on somehow, and gradually lifted itself higher and higher toward the crest of the hill five miles away that you reached without ever seeming to climb it, to be confronted all at once with the only real view between Wells and Green River.
"I used to think Grant's Hill was the end of the world," said Judith softly. "Maybe it is. It's funny I can say things like that to you, when you only laugh and won't answer. Listen. Isn't it still, so still it almost makes a noise."