The Wishing Moon Part 11

"Who?"

"You're too anxious to know, and too anxious to get rid of me.

And you're acting nervous."

"I'm not. I'm just sleepy."

Norah, her grimmest self, as she always was just before relenting, began to fumble with her hat-pins.

"Let me help, if you really want to take off your hat. You'll spoil your beautiful roses. Darling, you look like your niece, the lovely Miss Maggie Brady, in that hat. Don't take it off. You're cross because you know where I've been. Well, they didn't eat me. I'm all here. It was Willard who came, and I don't care whether you tell me or not. And I don't want to get rid of you. And I love you and you love me, and you're not cross now."

"If I love you, you've got need of it, then." Norah struggled perfunctorily, and permitted herself to be kissed. "Alone here till all hours of the night, and Mollie at the dance at the Falls, and your own mother----"

"But you won't worry about me? And you'll go? And you'll go now, before it gets later, so you won't be frightened. You'll go this minute?

And--oh, Nana----"

Norah, departing by the front door because the back one was secured by an elaborate system of locks of her own invention, and operated only by herself, turned to give Judith a farewell glance of grim adoration.

"Nana, was it Willard that came?"

"Yes."

"And not--anybody else?"

"No."

Norah, winding herself tightly into the cape in a way that converted that traditionally graceful garment into a kind of armour, disappeared up the street. When she was out of sight, and not until then, Judith slammed the door shut, laughing her tense, excited laugh again.

Then, for a sleepy young woman, she began to display surprising activity. First she turned off all the lights in the hall but one, in an opalescent globe, over the front door, looked at the faintly lighted vestibule with a calculating eye, and turned that out also. She looked critically in at the library, close curtained for the night, and dimly lit by the embers of the wood fire, raked apart, but not dead. She pushed them together expertly, and added a stick, a little one, which would soon burn down to picturesque embers, like the rest. She pulled an armchair closer to the fire, pushed it away again, and dropped two cus.h.i.+ons on the hearth with a discreet s.p.a.ce between.

The remains of Willard's last half-dozen carnations and a box of the eighty-cent-a-pound candy which only Mr. Edward Ward was extravagant enough to prefer to the generally popular fifty-cent Belle Isle, were conspicuous on the table, and Judith carried them into the next room, out of sight. Just then the telephone rang.

Judith started, dropped the candy, ran into the hall, and stood looking down at the small instrument resentfully, as if it were personally to blame because she could not see who was calling her without answering and committing herself. Once she picked it up doubtfully, but finally put it down, still ringing intermittently, and hurried into the kitchen.

She put a second bottle of ginger ale on the ice, brought a hammered bra.s.s tray and two gla.s.ses from the butler's pantry, then subst.i.tuted a less ostentatious bamboo tray, hesitated, and then put them all away again.

Now she went to her own room, turned on an unbecoming but searchingly clear toplight, and frowned at herself in the mirror, jerked out her hairpins, shook out her soft hair, and brushed and pulled at it with unsteady hands. In spite of them, the pale gold braids, rearranged, looked almost as well as before, if no better, and the heightened colour in her cheeks was charming. From a corner of her glove-case she produced the two cosmetics then in favour with the younger set in Green River, burnt matches, and a bit of scarlet ribbon, which made an excellent subst.i.tute for rouge if you moistened it. The ribbon was an unhealthy red, and looked peculiarly so to-night. Judith dropped it impulsively into her wastebasket, but experimented with the matches.

She made both her delicately shaded eyebrows an even splotchy black, admired the result, then suddenly rubbed it off, turned away from the mirror without a backward glance, and ran down into the hall. The clock was just striking ten.

Judith paused for one breathless minute at the library door, pressing both hands against her heart, then she went into the firelit room and made the last and most important of her preparations. She switched on the lights, toplights and sidelights and reading-lamp, all of them, went to the middle one of the three front windows, crushed the curtains back, and raised both shades high to the top, so that the light in the room looked out at the street from this window from sill to ceiling. Judith slipped quickly out of range of the window, dropped down on one of the cus.h.i.+ons by the fire, and waited.

She had fluttered through her little hurry of preparation excitedly, but now there was evidence of deeper excitement about the tense quiet of her, huddled on her cus.h.i.+on, small hands clasping silken knees, and brooding eyes on the fire. There was a dignity about her, too, in spite of her childish pose and a drooping grace that was almost a woman's.

What she was waiting for was slow to come, but she did not seem disturbed by that. The hands of the clock above her seemed to move with the unbelievable quickness characteristic of clock hands when there is no other activity in the room, and she observed them calmly. Soon they pointed to the quarter hour, they pa.s.sed it. She looked faintly worried then. The telephone rang again; she pressed her hands over her ears and shut her eyes tight, and did not answer. The stick on the fire burned low and she did not replace it. It parted and fell from the andirons with a dull noise that echoed loudly through the empty room. Judith started and jumped up, her eyes hard and bright, her hands tightly clenched.

She eyed the clock threateningly, as if it were personally responsible for whatever disappointment she might be feeling, and she were daring it not to strike. It struck half-past ten in spite of her. Judith's mouth trembled childishly, and tears started to her eyes. They did not fall.

Footsteps sounded outside. They turned into the drive. Judith stood on tiptoe and peeped at herself in the mantel mirror--her flushed cheeks, tumbled hair, and sparkling eyes. The steps crossed the porch, and she ran to the door and threw it open--the length of the chain, and no wider. She did not unbar the chain. On the threshold, with a substantial box of Belle Isle under his arm, stood Mr. Willard Nash.

Judith regarded Mr. Nash and his Belle Isle with disfavour.

"You can't come in," she said.

Mr. Nash, who had been stooping to flick some dust from his boots, straightened guiltily. "Why?"

"It's too late."

"I've got to see you."

"You do see me." A white dress, a face almost as white, and big, dark eyes were all he could see, but it seemed to be enough. He inserted a square-toed boot cautiously in the opening of the door.

"I want to see you _about_ something."

"What?"

"A new comic song for the quartette. They won't let us do 'Amos Moss' at the Lyceum concert. That part about the red s.h.i.+rt is vulgar. The new one's close harmony. It will show off Murph's voice."

"It's too late now. Go home, Willard."

"But I brought you this."

"Go home and eat it," suggested Judith.

Willard turned scarlet, swung round, then changed his mind and inserted his foot in the crack of the door again, this time with a purposeful air. He was to develop into the type of man to whom an unpropitious time and place are an irresistible temptation to demand a show-down. It is a type that goes far, though it is not essentially popular. Judith sighed, then resigned herself.

"Judy, I don't make you out."

"You don't have to."

"I do." Willard's voice was impressive, as even a fat boy's can be when he is in the grip of fate and conscious of it. "I do."

"I'm sorry, Willard, dear," murmured Judith, with disarming sweetness, but he was not to be turned from his purpose.

"Judy, are you going with me or not?"

"Going with you?"

"Don't be a sn.o.b. What else can I call it but going with me? I don't know any other way to say it."

"Then don't say it."

"You've got my cla.s.s pin and I've got yours. I know there isn't anybody else. You let me call and take you places, but you won't let me----"

"What?"

Willard looked sheepishly down at his boots, then bravely up at Judith.

"Put my arm round you at picnics. Kiss you good-night."

Judith cut short this catalogue crisply.

"Spoon?"