"And not—anybody else?"
"No."
Norah, winding herself tightly into the cape in a way that converted that traditionally graceful garment into a kind of armour, disappeared up the street. When she was out of sight, and not until then, Judith slammed the door shut, laughing her tense, excited laugh again.
Then, for a sleepy young woman, she began to display surprising activity. First she turned off all the lights in the hall but one, in an opalescent globe, over the front door, looked at the faintly lighted vestibule with a calculating eye, and turned that out also. She looked critically in at the library, close curtained for the night, and dimly lit by the embers of the wood fire, raked apart, but not dead. She pushed them together expertly, and added a stick, a little one, which would soon burn down to picturesque embers, like the rest. She pulled an armchair closer to the fire, pushed it away again, and dropped two cushions on the hearth with a discreet space between.
The remains of Willard's last half-dozen carnations and a box of the eighty-cent-a-pound candy which only Mr. Edward Ward was extravagant enough to prefer to the generally popular fifty-cent Belle Isle, were conspicuous on the table, and Judith carried them into the next room, out of sight. Just then the telephone rang.
Judith started, dropped the candy, ran into the hall, and stood looking down at the small instrument resentfully, as if it were personally to blame because she could not see who was calling her without answering and committing herself. Once she picked it up doubtfully, but finally put it down, still ringing intermittently, and hurried into the kitchen. She put a second bottle of ginger ale on the ice, brought a hammered brass tray and two glasses from the butler's pantry, then substituted a less ostentatious bamboo tray, hesitated, and then put them all away again.
Now she went to her own room, turned on an unbecoming but searchingly clear toplight, and frowned at herself in the mirror, jerked out her hairpins, shook out her soft hair, and brushed and pulled at it with unsteady hands. In spite of them, the pale gold braids, rearranged, looked almost as well as before, if no better, and the heightened colour in her cheeks was charming. From a corner of her glove-case she produced the two cosmetics then in favour with the younger set in Green River, burnt matches, and a bit of scarlet ribbon, which made an excellent substitute for rouge if you moistened it. The ribbon was an unhealthy red, and looked peculiarly so to-night. Judith dropped it impulsively into her wastebasket, but experimented with the matches.
She made both her delicately shaded eyebrows an even splotchy black, admired the result, then suddenly rubbed it off, turned away from the mirror without a backward glance, and ran down into the hall. The clock was just striking ten.
Judith paused for one breathless minute at the library door, pressing both hands against her heart, then she went into the firelit room and made the last and most important of her preparations. She switched on the lights, toplights and sidelights and reading-lamp, all of them, went to the middle one of the three front windows, crushed the curtains back, and raised both shades high to the top, so that the light in the room looked out at the street from this window from sill to ceiling. Judith slipped quickly out of range of the window, dropped down on one of the cushions by the fire, and waited.
She had fluttered through her little hurry of preparation excitedly, but now there was evidence of deeper excitement about the tense quiet of her, huddled on her cushion, small hands clasping silken knees, and brooding eyes on the fire. There was a dignity about her, too, in spite of her childish pose and a drooping grace that was almost a woman's.