For the first time in her steadily forward-going life there was a sharp, irrevocable break.  Something which had been yesterday was now no more.  She would never see Camilla again, she who recalled Camilla’s look of anguish as though they still stood side by side.  Her heart filled with unspeakable thankfulness that she had put her arms around Camilla’s neck at that supreme last moment.  That had not been Judith’s doing.  That had come from her own heart.  Unconsciously she had laid the first stone in the wall of self-respect which might in the future fortify her against her weaknesses.

She stood looking up blindly at the house, shivering again at the recollection of its echoing, empty silence.  The moment was one she never forgot.  Standing there in that commonplace backyard, staring up at a house like any one of forty near her, she felt her heart grow larger.  In that moment, tragedy, mystery, awe, and pity laid their shadowy fingers on her shining head.

CHAPTER IX

THE END OF CHILDHOOD

That afternoon a couple of children who came to play in the Marshall orchard brought news that public opinion, after the fashion of that unstable weathercock, was veering rapidly, and blowing from a wholly unexpected quarter.  “My papa says,” reported Gretchen Schmidt, who never could keep anything to herself, even though it might be by no means to her advantage to proclaim it—­“my papa says that he thinks the way American people treats colored peoples is just fierce; and he says if he’d ha’ known about our not letting Camilla go to the picnic, he’d ha’ taken the trouble to me ‘mit der flachen Hand schlagen.’ That means he’d have spanked me good and plenty.”

Maria Perkins, from the limb where she hung by her knees, responded, “Yup, my Uncle Eben says he likes Judy’s spunk.”

“I guess he wouldn’t have, if it’d ha’ been his pickles!” Gretchen made a last stand against the notorious injustice of fickle adult prejudices.

But the tide had begun to turn.  On Monday morning Sylvia and Judith found themselves far from ostracized, rather the center of much respectful finger-pointing on the part of children from the other grades who had never paid the least attention to them before.  And finally when the Principal, passing majestically from room to room in his daily tour of inspection, paused in his awful progress and spoke to Judith by name, asking her quite familiarly and condescendingly what cities you would pass through if you went from Chicago to New Orleans, the current set once and for all in the other direction.  No mention was ever made of the disappearance of the Fingals, and the Marshall children found their old places waiting for them.

It was not long before Judith had all but forgotten the episode; but Sylvia, older and infinitely more impressionable, found it burned irrevocably into her memory.  For many and many a week, she did not fall asleep without seeing Camilla’s ashy face of wretchedness.  And it was years before she could walk past the house where the Fingals had lived, without feeling sick.