Disregarding more public and usual ways of ascent, he struck straight across a stubbly field that lay behind a row of peculiarly forlorn and tumbledown houses into a path so narrow that it was hard to see until you were actually looking down it, between the twin birches that marked the entrance. He followed it to the base of the cliff itself. The belt of stunted birches and dusty-looking alders that skirted the cliff was broken by an occasional scraggly pine. The boy stopped under one of them, leaned against the decaying trunk, produced a letter, and read it.
It was only a pencilled scrawl of a letter, on the roughest of copy paper, and so crumpled that he must have been quite familiar with it, but he read it intently.
"Neil," it ran, "I'll meet you Saturday, on top of Mountain Rock, same time and place. I shan't see you till then. I don't want to. You frightened me last night. I don't like you lately. Be nice to me Saturday. JUDITH."
Only a pencilled scrawl, but he knew every word of it by heart, and of the burst of excited speech in the Judge's office nothing remained in his mind but the general impression that he had made a fool of himself there. Perhaps he was too familiar with Judith's letter, for the sting he had found there at first was gone from the words. He looked at them dully.
"I can't stand much more," he said aloud.
He said it lifelessly, and with no defiance in his eyes, stating only a wearisome fact. He had seen the Colonel's face through a kind of red mist in the Judge's office, and felt reckless and strong. He did not feel like a hero now. He was tired.
He would hardly have cared just now if you had told him that back in Judge Saxon's office two men who had not moved from their chairs since he left them, and who would not move until several vital points were settled, were discussing something he would not have believed them capable of discussing at such length and with so much feeling--the fortunes of the Donovan family.
He did not care just now for the little sights and sounds of spring that were all around him, the cluster of arbutus leaves at his feet, the faint, nestling bird noises, sweeter than song, and the stir and rustle of tiny, unclassified sounds that were signs of the pulse of spring beating everywhere, of change and growth going on whether human beings perceived or denied it.