. She started and looked up.

"Oh, it's you!" she said, peering at him through the darkness. "How you
startled me!"

"The others are going," said Ishmael. "It's been good of you to stay up
here. How long's the little chap been asleep?"

"Oh, ages! He's so sweet, I couldn't go downstairs to the lamp and all
of them somehow. So small and soft.... You are lucky, Ishmael."

"Am I?" said he, rather taken aback. "I hadn't thought of myself in that
light. But I know what you mean ... about Nicky."

They left the room together, but Judy cloaked herself in the passage and
would not go again into the brightly-lit room. The Parson and Killigrew
saw the two girls home, but Georgie and Boase reached the cottage first,
and Georgie fell asleep while she was sitting up in bed waiting,
scandalised, in spite of her modernity, for the return of Judith.

Nicky, sleeping peacefully in his little bed, had much to answer for
that day. He had shown the startled Ishmael the gap that lies between
two generations, whatever the tie of blood and affection; he had shown
him too, by his anger at being torn out of it, that he could still have
a mood of clamour for some thrill almost forgotten, some ecstasy he had
thought dead ... and he had sent Judy, trembling, eager, as not for many
months past, to the arms of the lover who could be so careless of her,
but whom, when she chose, she could still stir to a degree no other
woman had ever quite attained.

CHAPTER IX

JUDITH'S WHITE NIGHT

When Judith came in during the young dark hours of that morning, she
could not sleep, and for a time she busied herself trying to remove the
creases and dew-stains from her gown. Then she sat long by the window
before she went to bed and laid the head that a few hours ago had known
a sweet-smelling bracken pillow against the linen that could not cool
her burning cheek.

She was suffering as she invariably did every time she gave the lover's
gift to Killigrew; and always she paid for the joy of yielding with
hours of reaction. She was wont to live over again in the drear spaces
of time the history of her life since she had known him, and it was the
history of her love for him and of very little else. Now as she lay,
spent but wakeful, sick at heart and soul, she saw again the self that
had stayed in this house when first she grew to know him. How little she
had imagined then, in her pride and poise.... That was what stung her on
looking back--how litt