"Don't, son," muttered the Judge tardily, unregarded, but Colonel Everard listened courteously, with a faint, amused smile growing rather stiff on his thin lips.
"Him, that's too good to speak to me or look at me, sitting there grinning, and reading fine print, making out not to care, he's back of it all--him, Everard."
The two men, who had heard him out, did not interrupt him now. It was only a passionate jumble of boyish words they had listened to, but behind it, vibrating in his tense voice, was something bigger than he could frame words to express, something that commanded silence; pain forcing its way into speech, long repression broken at last. The dignity of it was about him still, though his brown eyes flashed no more defiance, and he was only a shabby and hopeless boy walking uncertainly to the office door, and fumbling with the handle.
"I'll go out this way," he said. "I've had enough of Theodore. And I've had enough of this place. I'll say good morning, gentlemen."
In a prosaic and too often unsatisfactory world, which is not the stage, no curtain drops to relieve you of the embarrassment of thinking what to say next after a record speech; you have to step out of the limelight, and walk somewhere else. Neil Donovan, emerging from the ancient building which contained Judge Saxon's office into Post-office Square after a brief interval of struggling successfully for self-control in a dusty corridor little suited to such struggles, and not even ensuring the privacy which is wrongly believed to be necessary for them, had one more appointment to keep. He was late for it already. He glanced at the town clock and started off hurriedly to keep it.
Back of Court-house Hill another street, starting parallel to Court Street, rapidly loses its sense of direction and its original character of a business street, wavers to right and left, past a scatter of discouraged looking houses, and finally slants off in the general direction of the woods at the edge of the town, and the abortive, sparsely wooded hill known to generations of picnickers--not the élite of the town, but humbler, more rowdy picnickers--as Mountain Rock.
The street never reaches it, but loses itself in a grubby tangle of smaller streets, thickly set with small houses, densely and untidily populated, the section known at first derisively and later in good faith as Paddy Lane. Through the intricate geography of this quarter Colonel Everard's only openly declared enemy might have been seen making a hasty and expert way ten minutes later; quickly and directly as it permitted him to, he approached the base of the hill.