The music was growing quicker and louder, working up gradually but surely into a breathless crescendo that meant the end of the dance. It whirled them dizzily about. The sleepy spell of the dance broke in this final crash of noise, and as it broke a sudden panic caught Judith.
What had she been saying to this boy? She had never talked like this to a boy before. And why was she dancing with him? She ought to be dancing with Willard--Willard, waiting there in the dressing-room door with her dance order in his hand, with the patient and puzzled look in his eyes, with brick-red colour in his cheeks from the affront she had subjected him to. What would Willard think of her? What would her mother think? And who was this boy? Just what the children had called him in taunting screams, on that long-ago May night, and she would have liked to scream it now--a paddy.
Instead, she lifted her head, no longer afraid of the boy's brown eyes, and said it, as cruelly as she could, in her soft and clear little voice:
"Paddy," she said; "a paddy from Paddy Lane."
She looked defiantly into his eyes, but they did not grow angry. They only grew very soft and kind, and they laughed at her. She wanted to look away from the laughter in them, but she could not look away from the kindness. Now she was not angry with him any more, but glad she was dancing with him. She knew she never wanted to stop dancing.
"Paddy?" He thought she had said it to remind him of that May night; he was remembering it now. "Are you that little girl?"
"And had such long black legs, and went scuttling across the lawn, and screaming out to me--that funny little girl?"
"But I did break the lantern," said Judith.
All the bravest stories that she had made up in the dark to put herself to sleep with at night, all the perilous adventures of land and sea, camp fire or pirate ship, began with the breaking of that lantern, and the boy she rescued had been her companion upon them, her brushwood boy, her own boy. She had found him at last, and he was laughing--laughing at her.
"Sure you did. As if I couldn't have broken away from a bunch of fool kids, without being doped with the smell of kerosene, and yelled at by another fool kid. Sure you broke the lantern. How mad I was."