In the street below the last of the afternoon light still lingered, reflected from the polished windows of the bank building, and faintly illuminating the half-deserted square, but the sun was just going down behind the court-house roof, a big, crimson ball of vanishing light. Judith, appearing below in the doorway, stood regarding it deliberately for a minute, ignoring the chauffeur's discreet manifestations of impatience, and then made herself comfortable deliberately in the Colonel's car.
She sat there proudly erect, a dainty, aloof little lady. She seemed to have recovered her high estate upon entering it, and become a princess beyond Neil's reach once more. Watching her gravely from the Judge's window, he could not see the angry tears in her eyes or the reckless light in them.
Little preliminary pants and puffs came from the car, discreetly impatient, as if they voiced all the feelings that the correct Parks repressed. He relieved them with one blatant flourish of sound from the horn, and swung the car grandly across the square, round the corner, and out of sight. Judith was gone, and she had not once looked up at the boy in the window.
She had not even seen another cavalier, who dashed out of a shop and tried to intercept and speak to her, but was just too late; Mr. Willard Nash, thrilled by his first sight of her, ready to return to his old allegiance at a word, and advertising the fact in every line of his forlorn fat figure as he stood alone on the sidewalk gazing wistfully after the vanished car.
The boy at the window did not waste his time in this way. Judith was gone, and with her the spell that had held him mute and helpless, and he was a man of affairs once more. He was not a very cheerful man of affairs to-night. He was not singing or whistling to himself, as he usually did, but he moved competently enough about the room, entering the Judge's private office with its smell of stale tobacco smoke and group of chairs, so confidentially close that they looked capable of carrying on the conference their late occupants had begun without help from them. He rearranged this room, giving just the straightening touches to the jumble of papers on the desk that the Judge permitted, and no more, and putting the outer office in order, too.
By his own desk he paused, fingering Mr. Thayer's thumbed pages absently. He had no attention to spare for them just then, or for the graver questions that had absorbed him just before Judith came. They would soon claim him again. They awaited him now, but out in the gathering dark that he watched from the darkening office something else waited, too.
His heart ached with it, but it beat harder and stronger for it, and new strength to meet old issues came pulsing from it, as if he were awake again after a year of sleep. He was grieved and miserable, but he was awake. For his mother was right: he was only a boy like other boys; he was young and it was June, and whether she was kind or unkind, Judith Randall was back in Green River.
Judith, whirled along the fast-darkening road between close-growing pines, dulling from green to black, and birches, silver against them, looked for the welcoming lights of Camp Everard through a mist of angry tears.
She shed them decorously, even under cover of the dark; she was still a dainty and proud little lady, with nothing about her to advertise conspicuously that she was crying, or why. But her little gloved hands were closing and unclosing themselves, her lips were trembling in spite of her, and there was a hunted look in her eyes as she turned them toward the dark woods, as if her quarrel with Neil were not her only trouble. The tears that she controlled so gallantly were a protest against a world only half understood and full of enemies whose alien presence she was just beginning to feel.