"Nonsense. Her curtains aren't up," replied the young man who was usually made speechless by it.
"She's asleep," conceded Mollie, in a manner more colloquial but also more forbidding. "She don't want to see you."
Mollie was incapable of interpreting Judith's wishes, but the young man was not; his smile conveyed this, though it was friendly enough. "When Miss Judith gets up, tell her——"
"I tell you she don't want to see you," snapped Mollie in a tone any French maid would have deplored. "She don't want to see anybody."
"Tell her that I'll call again at three this afternoon," directed the young man calmly, and completed his disturbing effect upon Mollie by turning and walking briskly away without a backward glance, and without his usual air of self-consciousness when her eyes were upon him. He carried his shabby coat with an air, and held his head high, and swung out of sight down the sleepy little street as if he were the only wide-awake thing in the whole sunny, sleepy town.
It was a disconcerting moment for Mollie or any lady properly conscious of her power, and sorry to see a sign of it disappear, even the humblest of signs. It would still have been disconcerting, if she could have foreseen that Judith would not receive this young man alone, either at three that afternoon, or for many afternoons. The young man was not overawed by Mollie. That was established once and for all. He would never be overawed by her again. She slammed the door rather viciously.
"Keep quiet there," said Norah, appearing inopportunely, as her habit was, with a heavily laden breakfast tray. "She needs her rest. But she's awake. She rang. You can take this up and leave it outside her door. Who was talking to you?"
"Well, I don't know what's come to him," Mollie complained. "Who does he think he is? Did anybody leave him a fortune over night? It was the Donovan boy."
A few minutes after Neil's encounter with Mollie, when Mr. Theodore Burr admitted him listlessly after his third knock at Judge Saxon's door, he could see no evidence that any one had left the Donovan boy a fortune over night, but did note a change in him. There was something appealingly grave and sedate about his face, as if a part of its youth, the freakish, unconquerable laughter of it, that had defied and antagonized Mr. Burr, were gone forever, burned away, somehow, in a night. It was a look Mr. Burr was to grow well used to in the next few months. Perhaps the unaccountable affection he was to feel for the boy in the course of them was born then and there.
Neil emerged from the Judge's private office after a briefer talk than usual, and the Judge did not escort him to the door in his accustomed, friendly fashion. Mr. Burr did, and made him clumsy and unwonted confidences there.