"Still we can be good friends," she said, and then broke away from the conventional words with a quick impatience. "Oh, being good friends is such a different thing from being really friends, though!" She took up her gloves and began to put them on slowly. "I had a letter from Judith just before I came over," she remarked. "She writes every three or four weeks, you know. She said you were down there, and that she and you were having a good time skating." "Yes, awfully jolly. She's a champion, you know!" Bernadette was busy with her gloves. She did not see the sudden lighting-up of his eyes, as her words recalled to him the vision of Judith skating, the vivid grace of motion and the triumph of activity, there on the ice down at Hilsey. "Oh, well, she's been to Switzerland in the winter a lot," said Bernadette carelessly. "I suppose she'd have gone this year, if it hadn't been for--" She raised her eyes again to his, and stopped with a glove half-way on. "Well, if it hadn't been for me, really!" She smiled, and jerked her head impatiently. "How I seem to come in everywhere, don't I? Well, I can't help it! She's got no one else belonging to her, and she used to be a lot with us anyhow." "Oh, you needn't worry about her; she's quite happy," said Arthur confidently. "I don't know that I was worrying, though I daresay I ought to have been. But she likes being there. I expect she'll settle down there for good and all." As she went back to her glove-buttoning she added, by way of an after-thought, "Unless she marries." Knowing the thing that was taking shape in his own heart, and reading his own thoughts into the mind of another, as people are prone to do, Arthur expected here a certain suggestion, was wondering how to meet it, and was in a way afraid of it. He felt a sense of surprise when Bernadette passed directly away from the subject, leaving her after-thought to assume the form of a merely perfunctory recognition of the fact that Judith was a girl of marriageable age and therefore might marry--perhaps with the implication that she was not particularly likely to, however. He was relieved, but somehow a little indignant. "You've told me hardly anything about yourself," said Bernadette. But here again the tone sounded perfunctory, as though the topic she suggested were rather one about which she ought to inquire than one in which she felt a genuine interest. "Oh, there's not much to tell. I've sown my wild oats, and now I've settled down to work."