to
take her share--she had caused him and others so much pain.

"_He_"--not even now did she mention his name--"wrote to me again, not
long ago, asking to see me again. It was impossible. And it was the
thought of you that made me know how impossible it was--_you_." The girl
laughed, almost hardly, but she was thinking of herself when she
did--not of him.

The time and circumstance that make woman the thing apart in a man's
life must come sooner or later to all women, and women must yield; she
knew that, but she had never thought they could come to her--but they
had come, and she, too, must give way.

"It is all very strange," she said, as though she were talking to
herself, and she rose and walked into the warm, fragrant night, and down
the path to the stiles, Crittenden silently following. The night was
breathless and the moonlit woods had the still beauty of a dream; and
Judith went on speaking of herself as she had never done--of the man
whose name she had never mentioned, and whose name Crittenden had never
asked. Until that night, he had not known even whether the man were
still alive or dead. She had thought that was love--until lately she
had never questioned but that when that was gone from her heart, all was
gone that would ever be possible for her to know. That was why she had
told Crittenden to conquer his love for her. And now she was beginning
to doubt and to wonder--ever since she came back and heard him at the
old auditorium--and why and whence the change now? That puzzled her. One
thing was curious--through it all, as far back as she could remember,
her feeling for him had never changed, except lately. Perhaps it was an
unconscious response in her to the nobler change that in spite of his
new hardness her instinct told her was at work in him.

She was leaning on the fence now, her elbow on the top plank, her hand
under her chin, and her face uplifted--the moon lighting her hair, her
face, and eyes, and her voice the voice of one slowly threading the
mazes of a half-forgotten dream. Crittenden's own face grew tense as he
watched her. There was a tone in her voice that he had hungered for all
his life; that he had never heard but in his imaginings and in his
dreams; that he had heard sounding in the ears of another and sounding
at the same time the death-knell of the one hope that until now had made
effort worth while. All evening she had played about his spirit as a
wistful, changeful light will play