And yet her brain clamored that there was more behind it all than mere witless repetition. John Anderson was smiling at her, too, smiling like a benevolent wraith. She saw that his pile of clay was still untouched, but there was no hint of petulant perplexity in his face, nothing of the terrified impotence which the inactivity of his fingers had always heralded before. He was just smiling--vaguely to be sure and a little uncertainly--but smiling in utter contentment and satisfaction, for all that. Very slowly--wonderingly, she crossed to him and put both arms about his white head and drew it against her. "I think you knew," she said to him, unsteadily. "I think you are able to understand better than I can myself. And I know, too, now. I do have to go--I must go to him. But he need not even know, until I tell him some day--that I was with him tonight." The old man pulled away from her clasp, gently but very insistently. And he nodded--nodded as though he had understood. She paused and looked back at him from the doorway, just as she had always hesitated. He was following her with his eyes. Again he shook his head, just as positively as he might have, had he been the man he might have been. "Some day," he reiterated, serenely, "some day! And she'll know then--some day I'll tell her--that I was with her tonight." She had forgotten the rain. It was coming down heavily, and it was dark, too--very, very dark. She stopped a while, as long as she dared, and waited with the rain beating cold upon her uncovered head and bare throat until her eyes saw the path a little more clearly. It took her a long time to feel her way forward that night. And even when she came within sight of Denny's lantern, even when she was near enough to see him through the thicket ahead of her, in the little patch of light, she had not decided what she meant to do. But with that first glimpse of him squatting there in the small cleared space it came to her what her course should be. She realized that if it was an impossibility for her to go to him, she could at least let him know she had been there--let him know that he had not been entirely alone while he waited. She even smiled to herself--smiled with wistful, half-sad, elfen tenderness as she, too, huddled down without a sound, there in the wet bushes opposite him, and decided how she would tell him. Denny Bolton never quite knew how long he waited in the rain before he was certain that there was no use waiting longer. More than half the night had dragged by when he reached finally into the pockets of his coat and searched for a scrap of paper. Watching from her place in the thicket near him, she recognized the small white card which he discovered--she even reached out one hand instinctively for her invitation from the Judge, which she had told him had never arrived and for which she had hunted in vain throughout the following days.