It ended as it had begun, the most successful party of the year. Mr. Brady's invasion was not the first unscheduled event which had enlivened a party at the Birches. There was more open and general speculation about the fact that the Randalls left immediately after, did not linger over their good-nights, and were obviously not permitted by their host to do so.
Mrs. Randall, leaning back in her corner with her hand tight in Harry's, and her long-lashed eyes, that were like Judith's, tightly shut, showed the full strain of the evening in her pale face. She was a woman who did not look tired easily, but she was also a woman who could not afford to look tired.
There was no appeal or charm about her pale face now, only a naked look of hardness and strain. Her husband, staring straight ahead of him with troubled eyes, and his weak, boyish mouth set in a hard, worried line, spoke rapidly and disconnectedly not of Judith, or the Colonel's ominous coldness to him, but of Mr. Brady.
"Maggie's a bad lot," he was explaining for approximately the fifth time as they whirled into the drive and under their own dark windows. "She always was. Everard isn't making away with the belle of Paddy Lane. Not yet. He's not that far down. But that dope about old Neil Donovan——"
"Oh, Harry, hush," his wife said, "here we are. What do you care about Brady?"
"Nothing," he whispered, his arm tightening round her as he lifted her down. "I don't care about anything in the world but Judith."
"Neither do I. Not really," she said in a hurried, shaken voice that was not like her own, "you believe that, don't you, Harry?"
He did not answer. Gathering up her skirts, she followed him silently to the front of the house, single file along the narrow boardwalk, not yet taken up for the summer, creaking loudly under their feet.
"Look," she whispered, catching at his arm. The front of the house was dark except for two lights, a flickering lamp that was being carried nearer to them through the hall, and a soft, shaded light that showed at a bedroom window. The window was Judith's. He fumbled for his key, but the door opened before them. Norah, her forbidding face more militant than ever in the flickering light of the kerosene hand-lamp she held, her white pompadour belligerently erect, and her brown eyes maliciously alight, peered at them across the door chain, and then gingerly admitted them.
"It's a sweet time of night to be coming home to the only child you've got," she commented, "why do you take the trouble to come home at all?"