The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1909-10-19

stol1c. unresponsive expression. It was
 as unreadable of anything. save stub oornress. as Trafford's own. His only response to the others unusually long | speech was cold.
 Good day."
 1 JUDITH.
 Grimbleshaw was provoked with himself. not simply for having told Trafford so much that to tell him
 more presented itself as a necessity, but as well because of the degree to l which the detective had impressed i himself on his imagination Trafford had told him. what? Simply that he had given Ca1den an order on the state agency for brandy and that he 1 had talked over the telephone with Altenburg two days before the latter's l death. The first fact was within the reach of any one who chose to exer- else the common right to inspect the | record of agency sales: the second would inevitably come to light in the perfectly natural inquiry that would i be made at the telephone office, in view of the two mysterious messages on the night Of the murder Actually. 1 therefore. Trafford had told him noth- ing. and yet had succeeded in impress ing him with the conviction that he knew much, and much. too. that, it 1 required skill to discover. It was. of course. a trick of the trade.. common
 enough in use. without doubt but that only changed the viewpoint to that of the question. Why had Trafford deem ed it necessary to use it on him? He
 wasn't certain that that might not be 1 the more disturbing phase of the af- fair. 5f However that might be. Trafford had nervous and uneasy. He poured him. self out a glass of whisky and only discovered that he had neglected the nlodicum of water when it stung his 1 throat.
 T suppose he'll go and tell Judith of out meeting in Braxton's woods yesterday" he muttered. tt'He didn't
 mention it to me. therefore he must have known it.''
 He had been saying "Judith' for the I last twenty-four hours for the mere pleasure of hearing the sound. and 1 now he said it involuntarily
 He had probably heard the name of
 Judith Calden forty times. on an easy estimate. since he came to Lanceboro.
 but it had carried no meaning with it
 until it was spoken by the man in the l doorway. when it put him into a fever of expectancy. Under what circun-
 stances would they meet he continual ly asked himself: for clearly they must meet under some circumstances, l in view of his relations to the murder and hers to the murdered man. Forth with he set himself to taking precau- 1 tions against the meeting. Then, just l as contrary things turn out i'm this 1 contrary world. they had come face~to iface in Braxtons woods. she on horse l back and he on foot It was devilish awkward for her no less than for him, I though he was bound to admit that
 she had carried it through wath that
 mask of indifference which is possible only in small things to the feminine
 capacity for duplicity. This reminded him that it might be of interest. when he was out of this scrape. as. of course he would some time be out of it, to take up the question whether the l detective mind was essentially of the I feminine cast
 Under the conditions of the meeting his only avenue of escape leading up la beech tree of stalwart dimensions
 he faced the encounter and expressed the hope that the sorrow and shock ot her uncle's death had not affected her seriously. Somehow their acquaint-
 ance of two winters before. a mere
 half dozen chance meetings at the
 houses of mutual friends in New
 York. seemed to develop into some
 thing of real substance under the at-
 mosphere of this sudden disaster. The artificialities of intercourse. invented for the policing of the social world
 became meaningless in the f1ashlight
 that revealed actual relationship. ever i relationship of repulsion.
 Its a shock, of course'' she said.
 Our affairs have so been dragged te light in the last forty-eight hours as
 to suggest that the public doesn't care
 much for our sorrow"
 She was a tall, dark girl. and he re- | membered that he had thought her al , most pretty. save for an expression ol
 repressment that made her face 8
 trifle too severe for prettiness. while
 yet falling a little short of claim to
 beauty. He had thought her cold and :. l distant and had found her almost ap- pealingly friendly Now the face was , older, graver and more deeply stamp
 ed with character. The prettiness. or possibility of prettiness. was gone. but one would have said that it was as
 yet undetermined whether beauty o1
 character was to become dominantly characteristic. There was repression
 too, but repression so controlling that
 one felt it as an atmosphere rather
 than saw it as an expression. It was as if she had gone so far in fghtinf
 sorrow that she herself had almost , ceased to understand it as sorrow.
 of course" he said. such an af fair arouses much greater interest il a place like Lanceboro than in biz city,"
 Scandal nas interest everywhere. she answered. rejecting the Drofferet mercy of his speech.
 J har in Sy