od to feel as
he walked through the night. And along the dark road before him,
familiar as it was, and worn so many times by discouraged feet, the
white track of moonlight beckoned him, clean and new. It was a way that
might lead anywhere--to fairy-land, to success, to the end of the world.

Now the boy made the turn in the road that brought him within sight of
home. Faint lights twinkling from it, intimate and warm, invited him as
never before. Was his mother waiting up for him? Home itself, lighted
and intimate and safe, was enough to find waiting. His heart gave a
strange little leap that hurt, but was keen pleasure, too. Almost
running, he covered the last bit of road, crossed the grassy front yard
and then climbed the creaking front steps, and stood for a minute that
was unendurably long, fumbling with the door.

The door was unlocked and gave suddenly, opening wide, and he stood on
the threshold of the kitchen. The lights he had seen were in the
sitting-room beyond. In this room there was only moonlight. It came
through the window that looked out on the marshy field, the fairies'
field. Surely there must be fairies there to-night, out in the empty
green spaces, flooded with moonlight. But the fairies were not all in
the field, there was one in the room. Neil could see it.

The old rocking chair stood in the moonlit window. It was holding two,
his mother, and some one else--the fairy, golden haired and white robed
and slender, and close in his mother's arms. As he stood and wondered
and looked, a board creaked under his feet. It was the faintest of
sounds, but a fairy's ears are keen, and the fairy heard, and stirred,
and turned in his mother's arms.

Now Neil could see her face. It was flushed and human and warm, and in
her eyes, opening grave and deep, was a look that was the shyest but
surest of welcomes. The welcome was all for Neil, and the fairy was
Judith.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

A boy and a girl sat on the doorsteps of the Randall house.

It was almost a year since the night of the rally. It was an evening in
late May--late, but it was May, and the fairies' month still. There was
a pleasant, shivery chill in the air. A far sprinkling of stars made the
dark of the still, windless night look darker and warmer and safer to
whisper in. The big horse-chestnut tree at the corner of the syringa
hedge was only a darker blot against the surrounding dark, and the slope
of faintly lit street on the other