She dressed without a glance into the mirror, and without need of it, it appeared, when she stood before it at last, pulling a left-over winter tam over rebellious curls which she had made no attempt to subdue. She had buttoned herself hastily into the dress she had taken off last, a tumbled organdy, and thrown a disreputable polo coat over it, white like the cap, but of more prehistoric date, but on her slender person these incongruous garments had acquired a harmony of their own, and become a costume somehow. It might not have withstood a long or critical inspection, but it was not subjected to one. Youth, in its divinely suited garb of white, regarded itself with grave eyes for one breathless minute, flushed and coquetted with itself for another, and then was gone from the mirror. Judith turned off the lights and stole out of the room, and downstairs.
There was nothing in the dark and empty house to frighten her. It must have been fear of whatever was before her that made her slip so softly across the hall, and tremble and stand still when the door chain rattled. The door was open at last. With a soft, inarticulate gasp of excitement, she stepped out into the May night.
Colonel Everard had an ideal night for the little dance in his garden, warm, but with a quiver of new life in the air. The May moon was in its last quarter, but lanterns were to supplement it. But the Colonel's guest of honour, pausing at the corner of Main Street and looking sharply to left and right, and then turning quickly off it, found very little light on the narrow and tree-fringed cross-street through which she was hurrying now but the moon.
It hung slender and pale and low above the ragged row of little houses, and seemed to go with her through the dark, but she took no notice of its companionship. The street was deserted, and the tap of her little heels sounded disconcertingly loud in the emptiness of it as she hurried on, turning from the narrow street into a narrower one.
This street had only one real end; pending the appropriation needed to carry it straight through, witheld by agencies which could only be connected by guess with Colonel Everard, it led feebly past a few houses which were nearly all untenanted and looked peculiarly so to-night, to a clump of alders at the edge of an unpenetrated wood lot, where it had paused. Just in front of it the girl paused, too.