l."

* * * * *

An hour later a boy was hurrying through the dark along the road to the
Falls.

He was almost home. Green River lay far behind with its scattered,
sparsely strewn lights. The flat fields around him and the unshaded road
before him, so bleak by day, were beautiful to-night, far reaching and
mysterious. Above them, flat looking and unreal, remote in a coldly
clouded sky, hung the yellow September moon.

"I've done for myself," the boy was saying half out loud, as if the
faraway moon could hear. "I've lost everything now. I've done for
myself."

The boy was sure of this, but could have told little more about the
events of the evening. He remembered listening outside the hall doors
until he was drawn inside in spite of himself, and listening there until
something snapped in his brain, and suddenly the long days of
repression, of vainly wondering what to do with his hard-won knowledge,
were over, and he was pouring it all out in one jumbled burst of speech.
He had no plan and no hope of doing harm to his enemy by speaking. He
had to speak.

After he had spoken he remembered getting down from the stage and out of
the hall somehow. He remembered the crushed goldenrod, slippery under
his feet. Against a background of blurred, unrecognizable faces, he
remembered a tall, black-garbed figure that rose to its feet swaying and
then steadying itself. It was Lilian Burr. Less clearly he remembered a
wave of sound from the hall that followed him as he hurried away across
the square. It was not like applause. He did not know or care what it
meant. After that, he remembered only the cool dark of the September
night as he walked through it aimlessly at first, and then turned toward
home.

"I've lost everything," he had said, and it must be true. How could he
face the Judge again? How could he go on living in Green River? This
was what all his long-cherished dreams had come to; a scene that Charlie
might have made, and disgrace in the eyes of the town. He had lost
everything.

Yet strangely, as he said it, he knew that it was not true. Whatever he
had lost, he had better things left. He had those free and splendid
minutes of speaking out his heart. They could not be taken from him. The
freedom and relief of them was with him still. And he had the road firm
under his feet, and the clean air blowing the fever out of his brain,
and the strength of his own young body, clean strength, go