"Next time be sure of your facts." The voice was friendly, almost paternal, but it held an insidious challenge, too, and for one betraying moment all the native antagonism that was really there flashed in the Colonel's eyes. Few enemies of his had been permitted to see it so clearly. It was a triumph for Neil, if a barren one. "Be very sure."
"I will, sir," said Neil deliberately, but very courteously. Then the Colonel disappeared into the private office with his arm about his trusted attorney's shoulders, and the young man for whose sake his attorney had openly defied him for the first time in years began to empty the office waste-baskets.
The winter weeks in the Judge's office passed without even moments of repressed drama like this. There was little to prove that they were the most important weeks of his life to Neil. At first they were lonely weeks. Mr. Burr, unusually prompt, reached the office one crisp September morning in time to find him staring out of the window at a straggling procession passing on its way up the hill to the schoolhouse, hurrying on foot in excited groups, or crowded into equipages of varying sizes and degrees of elegance, properly theirs or pressed into service.
"First day of school," said Neil, and did not need to explain further, even to Mr. Burr. From to-day on new faces would look out of the many-paned windows of the old, white-painted building. New voices would sing in the night on their way home from barge rides and dances. There were to be new occupants of the seats of the mighty; a new crowd would own the town. The door of the country of the young was shut in this boy's face from to-day, and that is always a hard day, but it was peculiarly hard in Green River, where the country of the young was the only unspoiled and safe place to live. And there were signs of a private and more personal hurt in the boy's faraway eyes.
"What's that letter?" said Mr. Burr.
"Seed catalogue."
"Don't she write to you every day?"
"Is she too proud, or did she forget all about you? She'll have time to, away half the summer, and not coming home for vacations. She won't see you till next June."
"If you mean Judith Randall," her late class-mate replied in a carefully expressionless voice, "why should she write to me, and why shouldn't she forget all about me?" There was a faint, reminiscent light in his eyes, as if he were not seriously threatened with the prospect, but it died away quickly, and his face grew very grave.