me
plumb to Atlanta. I was in the hospital there a long while. Looks like I
might have written to you--but I thought the best I could do was to let
you alone--I'd made you trouble enough," he ended with a wistful,
half-hopeful glance at her face.

Judith, taught by bitter experience, tried to meet this with the gentle,
reassuring cheerfulness of the nurse. It was all right. He mustn't talk
too much. He was here now. They didn't need any letter. But strive as she
might she could not keep out of her voice a certain alien tone; and
afterward the bitter thought dogged her that he had told her nothing
definite. She knew nothing, after all, about his relations with Huldah;
the girl might even, as Blatch declared, have been on the train, and gone
to Atlanta with him, and he have held back this information.

Perhaps, considering her temperament, Judith did as well as could have
been expected in the three days that followed--days in which Creed seemed
to make fair physical gain, but to grow worse and worse mentally. Never
once did she put into words the query that ate into her very soul, quite
innocent of the fact that it spoke in every tone of her voice, in every
movement of her head or hand, and kept the ailing mind to which she
ministered at tremble with the strain to answer.

On the fourth day, fretted past endurance by the situation, Judith
permitted herself some oblique hints and suggestions, on the heels of
which she left to prepare his breakfast. Returning to the sick-room with
the bowl of broth, she met the strange, unexpected, unsolicited reply to
all these withheld demands. Creed greeted her with a half-terrified
smile.

"Did you meet her goin' out?" he asked.

"Did I meet who, Creed?" inquired Judith, setting the bowl down on a
splint-bottomed chair, spreading a clean towel across the quilts, and
preparing for his breakfast. "Has there been somebody in here to see you
a'ready?"

"It was only Huldah," deprecated Creed. "You said--you asked--and she
just slipped in a minute after you went out."

Judith straightened up with so sudden a movement that the chair rocked
and the contents of the bowl slopped dangerously.

"Which way did she go?" came the sharp challenge.

"Out that door," indicating with an air of childlike alarm the front way
which led directly into the yard.

Judith ran and flung it open. Nobody was in sight. Heedless of the sharp
wintry air that blew in upon the patient, she stood searching the