CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
A boy and a girl sat on the doorsteps of the Randall house.
It was almost a year since the night of the rally. It was an evening in late May—late, but it was May, and the fairies' month still. There was a pleasant, shivery chill in the air. A far sprinkling of stars made the dark of the still, windless night look darker and warmer and safer to whisper in. The big horse-chestnut tree at the corner of the syringa hedge was only a darker blot against the surrounding dark, and the slope of faintly lit street on the other side of the hedge looked far away, with the dark sweep of lawn between. It was a night for the fairies, or for the girl and boy, and that was quite as it should be, for it was their first together for months.
Judith and Neil sat discreetly erect on the steps, undoing what those months apart had done with little bursts of shy speech, and long, shy silences that helped them more. In the longest and shyest silence their hands had groped for each other once, met as if they had never touched before, and clung together for a minute as if they never meant to let go, but Judith kept firmly to impersonal subjects still.
"You did it all," she said. "Things do happen so fast when they happen. Just think, this time last year he was like a king!"
"Everard?"
"Yes. Do you remember how I used to be cross when you called him that, and wouldn't say Colonel? How childish that was!" Judith patronized her dead self, as a young lady may, with her twentieth birthday almost upon her.
"You weren't childish."
"What was I?"
"Just what you are now."