eks, as if he had had the only restful and well-earned
sleep in Green River.

"Miss Judith," he said.

"Not at home," said Mollie, in a manner successfully copied from French
maids in the ten, twenty, thirties.

"Nonsense. Her curtains aren't up," replied the young man who was
usually made speechless by it.

"She's asleep," conceded Mollie, in a manner more colloquial but also
more forbidding. "She don't want to see you."

Mollie was incapable of interpreting Judith's wishes, but the young man
was not; his smile conveyed this, though it was friendly enough. "When
Miss Judith gets up, tell her----"

"I tell you she don't want to see you," snapped Mollie in a tone any
French maid would have deplored. "She don't want to see anybody."

"Tell her that I'll call again at three this afternoon," directed the
young man calmly, and completed his disturbing effect upon Mollie by
turning and walking briskly away without a backward glance, and without
his usual air of self-consciousness when her eyes were upon him. He
carried his shabby coat with an air, and held his head high, and swung
out of sight down the sleepy little street as if he were the only
wide-awake thing in the whole sunny, sleepy town.

It was a disconcerting moment for Mollie or any lady properly conscious
of her power, and sorry to see a sign of it disappear, even the humblest
of signs. It would still have been disconcerting, if she could have
foreseen that Judith would not receive this young man alone, either at
three that afternoon, or for many afternoons. The young man was not
overawed by Mollie. That was established once and for all. He would
never be overawed by her again. She slammed the door rather viciously.

"Keep quiet there," said Norah, appearing inopportunely, as her habit
was, with a heavily laden breakfast tray. "She needs her rest. But
she's awake. She rang. You can take this up and leave it outside her
door. Who was talking to you?"

"Well, I don't know what's come to him," Mollie complained. "Who does he
think he is? Did anybody leave him a fortune over night? It was the
Donovan boy."

A few minutes after Neil's encounter with Mollie, when Mr. Theodore Burr
admitted him listlessly after his third knock at Judge Saxon's door, he
could see no evidence that any one had left the Donovan boy a fortune
over night, but did note a change in him. There was something
appealingly grave and sedate about his face, as if a part of its youth,
the f