"Because I should be so disappointed in you, Launcelot."
For a moment they looked at each other in silence. The light wind came in through the open window and stirred the laces of Judy's dress, and blew a wisp of dark hair across her earnest eyes, which shone with a depth of feeling that Launcelot had never seen there before, and as he looked, the boy was suddenly possessed with the spirit that animated the knights of old who yearned to prove themselves worthy of their ladies.
"Would you be disappointed, Judy?" he asked, very low.
"Yes," she leaned forward, speaking eagerly. "You—you don't know what this summer has meant to me, Launcelot. I came here so miserable, so unhappy, and I found you and Anne—and because you were both so brave when you have so many things to make life hard, I think it made me a little braver, and I could bear things better, because of you, and Anne, Launcelot.
"And so—I want always to think of you as brave," she went on, "I want to feel though there are cowards in the world, that you aren't one; though there are boys who fail and boys who are not what they ought to be, that you are really brave and true and good, Launcelot—always brave and true and good—"
For a moment he could not speak, and then he said in a moved voice:
"Do you really think that, Judy?"
"Really, Launcelot."
"It helps me to know it—it will help me all my life," he said, simply, and for a moment his hand touched hers, as if a promise were given and taken.
All his life he carried the picture of her as she sat there with the silver light of the moon making a halo for her head—and though after that she was many times her old tempestuous self, yet the vision of little St. Judith, as he named her then, stayed with him, and led him to the heights.