om, and stared at the girl
who had come from the locked library.

"Not you," Neil's voice said dully. "Not here."

But the girl was Judith.

Bare-headed, slender in soft-falling white, she stood in the library
door with both hands behind her, clasping her big, limp hat by its
flaring brim. Her lightly poised, blond head was fluffy with small,
escaping curls, her clear-coloured cheeks were warmly flushed, and
between her red, slightly parted lips her breath came too quickly, but
softly, still. A sheer, torn ruffle trailed from her skirt. One
rose-coloured bow hung from her girdle awry and crushed, and looked the
softer for that, like a crumpled flower.

About her dress and her whole small self there was a drooping and
crumpled look. It was the look of a child that has played too hard.
Surely the most incongruous and pathetic little figure that had ever
appeared from a room where a distressed or designing lady was suspected
of hiding, she stood and returned Neil's look, but there was blank panic
in her eyes.

They turned from Neil to Mr. Brady, wild eyed and pale beside him, to
the disordered room, and back to Neil again, with no change of
expression at all. They were wide and dilated and dark, intent still on
some picture that they held and could not let go. Judith came an
uncertain step or two forward into the room, stiffly, as if she were
walking in her sleep, and stood still.

"Neil, what did you come here for?" she said. "I'm glad you came."

Her voice was sweet and expressionless, like her eyes, and though she
had called Neil by name, she looked at him as if she had never seen him
before. One small hand reached out uncertainly, pulled at his sleeve,
and then, as he made no move to take it, dropped again, and began to
finger the big hat that she held, and pluck at the flowers on it, but
her eyes did not leave his face.

"Will they stand for this?" Mr. Brady was demanding incoherently behind
them, "as young as this? Will the town stand it? No. And they won't
blame me now. They can't. It was coming to you--you----"

He was in the grip of his own troubles again, and breaking into little
mutterings of hysterical speech, which he now addressed directly to
Colonel Everard, standing over him and not seeming to feel the need of
an answer. It was an uncanny proceeding. The girl and boy did not watch
it. They were seeing only each other.

"Judith," Neil began stumblingly, "what were you doing there? What's
frighte