It was stopping there. It was one of the Everard cars, as the trim lines and perfection of detail would have shown without the English chauffeur's familiar, supercilious face. The car had only one occupant, a slender young person in white. She slipped quickly out, and disappeared into the dingy entrance hall below.
She had not seen the boy at the window. He stood still now in his corner, and waited. The tap of her feet was light even on the old creaking stairs, but he heard. She knocked once and a second time, and then threw open the door impatiently, saw who was there, and stopped just inside the door, and looked at him.
Her white dress and big, beflowered hat looked as cool and as new as June itself. They did not make the dingy room look dingier, they made you forget it was dingy. Her soft, befrilled skirts fluffed and flared in the brave and bewildering mode of the moment. Skirts, small shoes that were built to dance, not to walk, the futuristic blend of flowers in her hat, and the girdle, unrelentingly high and futuristic of colour, too, that gave her waist an unbelievably slender look, were all in the dainty and sophisticated taste of a sophisticated young lady, and under the elaborate hat there was a sophisticated young face. It looked smaller and more faintly pink. The small chin was more prominent. But she still had the wide, reproachful eyes of a child. They regarded the boy unwinkingly. One hand went behind her, found the knob of the door, and closed it mechanically, but the eyes did not leave his face.
He stepped uncertainly forward, and stopped.
"Well, Judith," he said, in a voice that held all the authority Judge Saxon's assistant had acquired in the long year of his service and more, "Well?" and then, in a voice that held no authority at all, but was suddenly husky and small: "Oh, Judith, won't you speak to me?"
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
"Judith," Neil said.