“He”—­not even now did she mention his name—­“wrote to me again, not long ago, asking to see me again.  It was impossible.  And it was the thought of you that made me know how impossible it was—­you.”  The girl laughed, almost hardly, but she was thinking of herself when she did—­not of him.

The time and circumstance that make woman the thing apart in a man’s life must come sooner or later to all women, and women must yield; she knew that, but she had never thought they could come to her—­but they had come, and she, too, must give way.

“It is all very strange,” she said, as though she were talking to herself, and she rose and walked into the warm, fragrant night, and down the path to the stiles, Crittenden silently following.  The night was breathless and the moonlit woods had the still beauty of a dream; and Judith went on speaking of herself as she had never done—­of the man whose name she had never mentioned, and whose name Crittenden had never asked.  Until that night, he had not known even whether the man were still alive or dead.  She had thought that was love—­until lately she had never questioned but that when that was gone from her heart, all was gone that would ever be possible for her to know.  That was why she had told Crittenden to conquer his love for her.  And now she was beginning to doubt and to wonder—­ever since she came back and heard him at the old auditorium—­and why and whence the change now?  That puzzled her.  One thing was curious—­through it all, as far back as she could remember, her feeling for him had never changed, except lately.  Perhaps it was an unconscious response in her to the nobler change that in spite of his new hardness her instinct told her was at work in him.

She was leaning on the fence now, her elbow on the top plank, her hand under her chin, and her face uplifted—­the moon lighting her hair, her face, and eyes, and her voice the voice of one slowly threading the mazes of a half-forgotten dream.  Crittenden’s own face grew tense as he watched her.  There was a tone in her voice that he had hungered for all his life; that he had never heard but in his imaginings and in his dreams; that he had heard sounding in the ears of another and sounding at the same time the death-knell of the one hope that until now had made effort worth while.  All evening she had played about his spirit as a wistful, changeful light will play over the fields when the moon is bright and clouds run swiftly.  She turned on him like a flame now.

“Until lately,” she was saying, and she was not saying at all what she meant to say; but here lately a change was taking place; something had come into her feeling for him that was new and strange—­she could not understand—­perhaps it had always been there; perhaps she was merely becoming conscious of it.  And when she thought, as she had been thinking all day, of his long years of devotion—­how badly she had requited them—­it seemed that