"I've done for myself," the boy was saying half out loud, as if the faraway moon could hear. "I've lost everything now. I've done for myself."
The boy was sure of this, but could have told little more about the events of the evening. He remembered listening outside the hall doors until he was drawn inside in spite of himself, and listening there until something snapped in his brain, and suddenly the long days of repression, of vainly wondering what to do with his hard-won knowledge, were over, and he was pouring it all out in one jumbled burst of speech. He had no plan and no hope of doing harm to his enemy by speaking. He had to speak.
After he had spoken he remembered getting down from the stage and out of the hall somehow. He remembered the crushed goldenrod, slippery under his feet. Against a background of blurred, unrecognizable faces, he remembered a tall, black-garbed figure that rose to its feet swaying and then steadying itself. It was Lilian Burr. Less clearly he remembered a wave of sound from the hall that followed him as he hurried away across the square. It was not like applause. He did not know or care what it meant. After that, he remembered only the cool dark of the September night as he walked through it aimlessly at first, and then turned toward home.
"I've lost everything," he had said, and it must be true. How could he face the Judge again? How could he go on living in Green River? This was what all his long-cherished dreams had come to; a scene that Charlie might have made, and disgrace in the eyes of the town. He had lost everything.
Yet strangely, as he said it, he knew that it was not true. Whatever he had lost, he had better things left. He had those free and splendid minutes of speaking out his heart. They could not be taken from him. The freedom and relief of them was with him still. And he had the road firm under his feet, and the clean air blowing the fever out of his brain, and the strength of his own young body, clean strength, good to feel as he walked through the night. And along the dark road before him, familiar as it was, and worn so many times by discouraged feet, the white track of moonlight beckoned him, clean and new. It was a way that might lead anywhere—to fairy-land, to success, to the end of the world.
Now the boy made the turn in the road that brought him within sight of home. Faint lights twinkling from it, intimate and warm, invited him as never before. Was his mother waiting up for him? Home itself, lighted and intimate and safe, was enough to find waiting. His heart gave a strange little leap that hurt, but was keen pleasure, too. Almost running, he covered the last bit of road, crossed the grassy front yard and then climbed the creaking front steps, and stood for a minute that was unendurably long, fumbling with the door.
The door was unlocked and gave suddenly, opening wide, and he stood on the threshold of the kitchen. The lights he had seen were in the sitting-room beyond. In this room there was only moonlight. It came through the window that looked out on the marshy field, the fairies' field. Surely there must be fairies there to-night, out in the empty green spaces, flooded with moonlight. But the fairies were not all in the field, there was one in the room. Neil could see it.
The old rocking chair stood in the moonlit window. It was holding two, his mother, and some one else—the fairy, golden haired and white robed and slender, and close in his mother's arms. As he stood and wondered and looked, a board creaked under his feet. It was the faintest of sounds, but a fairy's ears are keen, and the fairy heard, and stirred, and turned in his mother's arms.
Now Neil could see her face. It was flushed and human and warm, and in her eyes, opening grave and deep, was a look that was the shyest but surest of welcomes. The welcome was all for Neil, and the fairy was Judith.