The Wishing Moon

by Louise Elizabeth Dutton

But Neil, as she had just seen him, was enough to occupy the mind of such a young lady, or a much older one. The look in his eyes as he stood holding open the Judge's door for her was a highly irritating one for any lady to meet. He was older and wiser than she was, no matter what she could say or do to hurt him; he was stronger than she was, and patiently waiting to prove it to her; that was what Neil's eyes were saying.

They said it first when he left her at her own door without a good-night on that strange May night a year ago; when she stood looking up at him changed and alien and silent, with the May moon behind him, that had brought her bad fortune instead of good, still dim and alluring with false promises above the shadowy elms in the little street, and they looked down at her just so—Neil's grave, unforgettable, conquering eyes. They were eyes that followed you to-night, when you tried to forget them and look at the dark woods and fields; eyes that looked at you still when you closed your own.

But Judith would not look at them. The eyes were lying to her. Neil was not really wise or kind. He was cruel. He had hurt her and slighted her, and she was through with him.

"Parks, can't you go faster?" she said suddenly, in her clear little voice. "It's so late, and I'm hungry and cold."

"It's bad going through here, Miss," the chauffeur said.

They were turning into a narrow mile or so of road that sloped gradually down through a series of arbitrary curves and bends to the lake and the camp, a changed and elaborate structure now, overweighted with verandas and uncompromisingly lit with new electric lights. But the road was one of the things that the Colonel did not improve when he changed the public camp into a private one. It was unchanged and unspoiled, a mysterious wood road still, alluring now in the gloom.

Judith's own people were waiting for her there at the end of that road. They were all the people she had. Willard and schooltime and playtime were more than a year behind her; they were behind her forever. She could never go back to them. She had never really been part of them. She had forced herself into a place there, but she had lost it now, and it could never be hers again.

These were her people. They were strange to her still, but she had grown up breathing the feverish air that they breathed, and with little whispers of hidden scandal about her. Judith was alone between two worlds: one was closed to her, and she was before the door of another, where she did not know her way. She was really alone, as she had told Neil, more alone than she knew; a lonely and tragic figure, white and small in the corner of the big car.

But she was not crying now. She dabbed expertly at her eyes with an overscented scrap of handkerchief and sat up, looking eagerly down the dark road. She could catch far echoes of a song through the still night air, faint echoes only, but it was a song that she knew, a gay little song, and it came from a place where people were always kind and gay. It was like a hand stretched out to her through the dark, a warm hand, to beckon her nearer, and then draw her close. She leaned forward and listened and looked.

There was the camp, the first glimpse of it, though soon a dip of the road would hide it again. It was an enchanting glimpse, a far, low-lying flicker of light. And there, just by the big, upstanding boulder where the road turned abruptly, she saw something else. She saw it before Parks did, as if she had been watching for it. It was a man's figure that started forward, came to the edge of the road, and waited. The man looked more than his slender height in the shadow, but his light, quick walk was unmistakable. It was Colonel Everard.