"I'll wait and see then. I had to begin somewhere."
"Why?" said the Judge, and as he asked the question, the answer to it, which he had once known so well and forgotten, looked at him in the boy's pale face and glowing eyes, the great answer not to be silenced, youth, and the wonderful, wasteful urge of youth. "Don't you know this town's sick?" he demanded abruptly. "It's dirty. You can't clean it up. Don't you ever try. Don't you stir things up. Don't you dig in too deep. I suppose you know the town's got no room for you?"
"Yes, sir, I know."
"Where do you expect to end?" the Judge began irritably, "in the poorhouse? You're so damn young," he grumbled. "It's a good thing I didn't know you when I was young. I'd have listened to you then."
"You will now, sir," said the boy, and the Judge did not contradict him, but instead, under shy pretence of groping for the switch of the desk lamp, found the boy's hand and gripped it.
"You're a good boy," he remarked irrelevantly. "Mind what I said, and don't dig in too deep."
The Judge did not explain whose secrets he hoped to protect by this vague warning. Probably he could not have explained. It was one of those instinctive pronouncements which shape themselves in rare moments when two people are close and mean more than either of them know. Certainly if the key to any secret was to be found within the Judge's dingily decorated walls or in his battered safe, or learned from his partner, the boy had exceptional opportunities to unearth it. Theodore Burr's intimacy with Neil developed rapidly. He stuck to it obstinately, in spite of his wife, showing more independence about it than he had in years. The two had tramped and snow-shoed together through long winter hours of intimate talk and more intimate silence, and they found the first Mayflowers of the year together. Only the week before he had committed the crowning indiscretion of giving up a poker game at the Everards' to go shooting with Neil.
The Judge, in the strenuous days of Colonel Everard's summer campaign, had no time to observe the growth of this intimacy or to think much about Neil, but he might have been interested in a snatch of talk in the Brady kitchen one evening, if he could have overheard it, more interested than Mrs. Donovan, who did not remember it long.
Her son was an hour late for supper, but she was used to that, for now that he was on his feet the house revolved around him. She served him, and then sat watching him with her hands folded, and the new dignity that had come with his first bit of success straightening her tired shoulders, and the look of age and pain that had been growing there since Maggie disappeared widening her soft, deep eyes. He had dropped wearily into his chair, and he ate almost in silence, but she was used to that, too.
Outside the short, June twilight was over, and a pattering summer rain had begun to fall. Neil's dark hair was damp with it and clung to his forehead in close curls. Once, passing his chair, she smoothed it with a hand that was work hardened but finely made and could touch him lightly and shyly still. Her son pulled her suddenly close, and hid his face against her.