emembering its
ancestry still.

"Splendid," Judith breathed. "Keep off Main Street."

"Yes."

The ancient vehicle, well oiled, but rattling faintly still, swung
alarmingly close to one street corner lamp-post and then another. Judith
nestled almost out of sight in her corner. Neil leaned forward,
gripping the reins with an ungloved hand that whitened at the knuckles,
his dark eyes looking straight ahead. His brooding eyes and quiet mouth,
and even the whiteness of his face had something unfamiliar about them,
something that did not all come from the unhealthy light of the street
lamps, something strange but unaccountably charming, too. Judith had no
eyes for it just then.

"This is silly. I ought not to have come. Who's that?"

"Nobody. Just a tree. Sit still. We'll go under the railroad bridge and
out over Grant's Hill. There won't be any more lights."

"It looked like some one."

"What do you care?"

"It looked like your cousin Maggie."

"She's at home in bed. She was tired to-night."

"Oh. Well, it looked like her. It was silly to come. I never shall come
again."

As if this were not a new threat, or had for some reason lost it terrors
to-night, the boy did not contradict her. They had left track and
railroad bridge behind now, darker blots against the surrounding dark,
with the lights of the station showing faintly far down the track. They
were passing the last of the houses that straggled along the
unfashionable quarter above the railroad track. Most of the houses here
were dark now. In the Nashs' windows the last light puffed suddenly out
as they went by.

Down in the town behind them other sleepy little lights were burning
faintly, or going out, but ahead of them the faintly moonlit road looked
wide-awake. It was an alluring road. It dipped into wooded hollows, it
broke suddenly into arbitrary curves and windings but found its way out
again, and kept on somehow, and gradually lifted itself higher and
higher toward the crest of the hill five miles away that you reached
without ever seeming to climb it, to be confronted all at once with the
only real view between Wells and Green River.

"I used to think Grant's Hill was the end of the world," said Judith
softly. "Maybe it is. It's funny I can say things like that to you, when
you only laugh and won't answer. Listen. Isn't it still, so still it
almost makes a noise."

It was very still. You could feel the pulse of the night here. There was
a whis