. They
would soon claim him again. They awaited him now, but out in the
gathering dark that he watched from the darkening office something else
waited, too.

His heart ached with it, but it beat harder and stronger for it, and new
strength to meet old issues came pulsing from it, as if he were awake
again after a year of sleep. He was grieved and miserable, but he was
awake. For his mother was right: he was only a boy like other boys; he
was young and it was June, and whether she was kind or unkind, Judith
Randall was back in Green River.

* * * * *

Judith, whirled along the fast-darkening road between close-growing
pines, dulling from green to black, and birches, silver against them,
looked for the welcoming lights of Camp Everard through a mist of angry
tears.

She shed them decorously, even under cover of the dark; she was still a
dainty and proud little lady, with nothing about her to advertise
conspicuously that she was crying, or why. But her little gloved hands
were closing and unclosing themselves, her lips were trembling in spite
of her, and there was a hunted look in her eyes as she turned them
toward the dark woods, as if her quarrel with Neil were not her only
trouble. The tears that she controlled so gallantly were a protest
against a world only half understood and full of enemies whose alien
presence she was just beginning to feel.

But Neil, as she had just seen him, was enough to occupy the mind of
such a young lady, or a much older one. The look in his eyes as he stood
holding open the Judge's door for her was a highly irritating one for
any lady to meet. He was older and wiser than she was, no matter what
she could say or do to hurt him; he was stronger than she was, and
patiently waiting to prove it to her; that was what Neil's eyes were
saying.

They said it first when he left her at her own door without a good-night
on that strange May night a year ago; when she stood looking up at him
changed and alien and silent, with the May moon behind him, that had
brought her bad fortune instead of good, still dim and alluring with
false promises above the shadowy elms in the little street, and they
looked down at her just so--Neil's grave, unforgettable, conquering
eyes. They were eyes that followed you to-night, when you tried to
forget them and look at the dark woods and fields; eyes that looked at
you still when you closed your own.

But Judith would not look at th