ee it so
clearly. It was a triumph for Neil, if a barren one. "Be very sure."

"I will, sir," said Neil deliberately, but very courteously. Then the
Colonel disappeared into the private office with his arm about his
trusted attorney's shoulders, and the young man for whose sake his
attorney had openly defied him for the first time in years began to
empty the office waste-baskets.

The winter weeks in the Judge's office passed without even moments of
repressed drama like this. There was little to prove that they were the
most important weeks of his life to Neil. At first they were lonely
weeks. Mr. Burr, unusually prompt, reached the office one crisp
September morning in time to find him staring out of the window at a
straggling procession passing on its way up the hill to the schoolhouse,
hurrying on foot in excited groups, or crowded into equipages of varying
sizes and degrees of elegance, properly theirs or pressed into service.

"First day of school," said Neil, and did not need to explain further,
even to Mr. Burr. From to-day on new faces would look out of the
many-paned windows of the old, white-painted building. New voices would
sing in the night on their way home from barge rides and dances. There
were to be new occupants of the seats of the mighty; a new crowd would
own the town. The door of the country of the young was shut in this
boy's face from to-day, and that is always a hard day, but it was
peculiarly hard in Green River, where the country of the young was the
only unspoiled and safe place to live. And there were signs of a private
and more personal hurt in the boy's faraway eyes.

"What's that letter?" said Mr. Burr.

"Seed catalogue."

"Don't she write to you every day?"

"Who?"

"Is she too proud, or did she forget all about you? She'll have
time to, away half the summer, and not coming home for vacations. She
won't see you till next June."

"If you mean Judith Randall," her late class-mate replied in a carefully
expressionless voice, "why should she write to me, and why shouldn't she
forget all about me?" There was a faint, reminiscent light in his eyes,
as if he were not seriously threatened with the prospect, but it died
away quickly, and his face grew very grave.

"I'm a business man now, Theodore."

"You are," said his newest friend, "and we couldn't keep house without
you now. You're in a class by yourself."

This was true. Neil did not take his big chance at life as other boys
e