She said she had come because she felt that if she talked with me I might be better able to understand Alfred when he came, and that she had seen that the judge was very determined, and she thoroughly recognised his force of character. We stopped there while I gave her the document to read. I suppose it was dishonourable, but I needed her protection from it. I'm glad she had the strength of mind to walk with a head high in the air to the fire and burn it up. Anything might have happened if she hadn't. And even now I feel that only my marriage vows will close up the case for the judge—even yet he may—— But when Ruth had got done with Alfred, she had wiped Judge Wade's appreciation of him completely off my mind and destroyed it in tender words that burned us both worse than Jane's fire burned the letter. She did me an awfully good service.,
And there I sat in my front room, being embraced in a perfume of everybody's lilacs and hawthorns and affectionate interest and moonlight, with a letter in my hand from the man whose two photographs and letters I used to keep locked up in my desk. Is it any wonder I tingled when he told me that he had never come back because he couldn't have me, and that now the minute he landed in England he was going to lay his heart at my feet? I added his colonial honours to his prostrate heart myself, and my own beat at the prospect. All the eight years faded away, and I was again back in the old garden down at Aunt Adeline's cottage saying good-bye, folded up in his arms. That's the way my memory put the scene to me, but the word "folded" made me remember that blue muslin dress again. I had promised to keep it and wear it for him when he came back—and I couldn't forget that the blue belt was just twenty-three inches and mine is—no, I won't write it. I had got that dress out of the old trunk not ten minutes after I had read the letter and measured it.,
"Patricia!" gasped Judith, shocked out of her dreamy calm. "You oughtn't to say things like that. It's—it's not religious!".
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