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He would not catch Judith’s eye as she tried to speak to him. Kitty sat alone for the moment. She had sent the young lieutenant to fetch her a cup of coffee, but as Peter approached with Judith she averted her eyes. "Kitty, may I present to you my fiancée, Miss Rodney?" Kitty rose superbly to the situation.
Judith’s half-sister, Eudora, was making a pretty quarrel by perversely forgetting the order in which she had given her dances. The girl was so undeniably happy that Judith dreaded the grim news she must tell her. Eudora blushed as she encountered Judith’s eye. Her half-sister ever offered a check on Eudora’s exuberant coquetry, with its precipitation of discussions that often ended in bullets.
So Peter followed Judith, pleading Judith’s cause; she did not understand, he told her, what she was doing; and while perhaps there was not another man in the country who would not honor her unselfishness in coming to him, Lorimer’s chivalry was not a thing to be reckoned with, drunken beast that he was.
From the attitude of the group around Judith and Peter Mary divined what had happened, and came to add her congratulations. Even Mrs. Yellett forgot to choose an axiom as her medium of expression, and kissed Judith publicly, with affectionate unction. Henderson had effaced himself, and Leander, proud of his triumph and Judith’s commendation, sat in a corner and smiled contentedly.
Judith’s training was not one to impel her to give her confidence to strangers, still she had liked the little Eastern girl. These were the perplexities that beset her, sweeping her thoughts hither and thither, as sea-weed is swept by the wash of the waves. She strove to collect her faculties. How should she rid the house of her cavaliers?
Judith and Henderson were leading the last figure, their hands clasped high in an arch through which the dancers trooped in couples. Again and again he tried to catch Judith’s eye, but her glance never once met his. Her great, wide eyes had a far-away look as if they saw some tragedy, the shadow of which would never fall from her.
To the woman of the world, Judith’s ingenuous display of feeling had in its very sincerity a something pitiable. How could she strip from her soul every fold of reserve and stand unloved and unashamed, sanctified, as it were, by the very hopelessness of her passion? How could women make of their whole existence a thing to be rejected, reflected Kitty, who, giving nothing, could not understand.
He would take her away from here. She could take her place in his family and reflect credit on his choice. His family, his friends—he winced at the thought of their possible reception of the news. But Judith’s presence would adjust these difficulties. He would present her to Kitty now, that his old friend might see what manner of woman she was.
But Peter was too loyal a friend, despite his shortcomings as a lover, to see in Judith’s statement anything more than a sisterly devotion so deeply unselfish that it failed to take into account the danger to which she subjected herself.
"Oh, don’t you see," pleaded Judith, "that if something had not happened to him he would have been here long ago?" Judith’s anxiety awoke in Kitty a new consciousness. What was she to him, that at the possibility of harm, a fear not shared by Kitty, she should throw off a reserve that every line of her face pronounced habitual?
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