She seated herself in her place on the old-fashioned mahogany sofa.

"Do you mind?" I asked.

"No, I'm glad!" she said, and wriggled like a pleased child, yet so slightly that no one could have accused her of it.

"Do you like me?" said I, after a moment.

Her eyes opened very wide and looked into mine seriously—half amused, half frightened. At last she nodded in a matter-of-fact way; it was only because I could see her hands pressed against the arm of the couch until they were white and little blue veins had begun to show that I knew she was capable of the stoicism of an Indian, and that her nod was not matter-of-fact, after all.

As I have told you, I am not of an habitually romantic temperament. I was well aware of my unfitness to deal with a girl who, herself, had never known the processes of lovers, but the belief that she was trying to restrain her true feelings toward me ran through my brain like an intoxicating liquor. I would have taken the breadth of her shoulders in the crook of my arm, and pressed my face into the rich mass of her hair, and kissed her upon her white forehead, had I not suddenly recalled that never had I even phrased to her a sentence explaining my feeling toward her.

"Of course I do," she said at that moment. I remember how cool the words sounded.

I remember, indeed, every word of that evening, every detail of that room, every play of expression about her mouth, and I cannot go on without speaking of these things. They meant so much to me and have meant so much ever since!

At last, then, I told her.

"Julianna—" said I. "I have never called you by that name before. I have not seen you long. But I must disregard all facts of that kind. They may be important to some men and women. They are not of consequence to me. I have loved you from the first."

She gave a little cry, but whether it was of joy or surprise I cannot say. I only know that when I leaned forward and took one of her hands in my own, she left it there as if it belonged to me of right, and with my finger tips upon her soft wrist I could feel the beating of her heart.

"I don't want to love any one else," I whispered desperately. "I want you. I want you to love me. I want you to let me take you."

I thought when I had said this and pressed my lips to the back of her hand and looked up at her again that her face was illuminated with wonder, joy, and supreme gladness, and that her eyes were filled with light reflected from some bright revelation. What, then, was my astonishment to observe that, as I looked, the color seemed to fade from her skin, her parted lips slowly compressed themselves, her eyelids fell like those of one who suffered pain or shuts out some repulsive sight! It may have been my imagination; but I was sure I felt her hand turn cold in mine and draw away as if to escape a menace. Her body stiffened as if preparing for effort or defense and she arose from her seat and stood before me.

So little did I understand the significance of her actions that I neither moved nor spoke.

She came toward me then and placed the tips of her fingers upon my shoulder affectionately, I can say—as she might have touched her father, and as if she meant to cause some unsaid thing to flow through the contact into my body.

"Please do not get up," she said softly. "Do not follow me."

There was strength in that command.

She walked toward the long windows at the back of the room, the windows which overlooked the garden, and pulling them open, stepped out onto the balcony. The vine there being in bloom, her figure was framed with the soft purple of the flowers, which, lit by the light from within and pendant against the black background of night, might well have been blossoms embroidered on Japanese black satin. With my head swimming, I watched the movement of her bare shoulders, from which her modest scarf had half fallen, until she turned to enter again.

"I shall not tell you that I am sorry that you have spoken as you have," she said, spacing her words so evenly that it gave the impression at first that she was repeating memorized sentences. "But I am young and no one else has ever done so. Perhaps I should have interrupted you and told you that my duty is toward my father, and that I am not sure of myself now, and that I am not ready to give myself to any other life. If this is true, it can profit neither of us to talk of love."

"Neither of us!" Again it seemed to me that she had disclosed herself. I stood before her and in a voice that shook with eagerness, I said, "You love me. At least you love me a little?"

She drew back.

"You do!" I cried under my breath. "I know it! You do!"

She raised her hands as if to keep me from her, and still retreated toward the hearth.

"You love me!" I said. The sound of my own voice was raising a madness within me. "Say it!" I cried. "Say it!"

She turned quickly away from me.

"You love me."

"No," she said. "I do not—love—you!"

I think for a second neither of us stirred; for a second, too, I could see that her body had relaxed as mine had relaxed. Then I felt the sting of wrecked pride—the pride from which I suppose I never shall escape. I can remember that I drew a long breath, made a low bow, which, though not so intended, must have been both insulting and absurd, and walked through the curtains into the hall. I looked back once and that fleeting glance showed me only a beautiful girl who stood very stiffly, like a soldier saluting, but who, unlike a soldier, stood with closed eyes and with her long lashes showing against a pale and delicate skin.

How miserable I was in the following hours, I cannot well describe. After I had returned to my own apartments I sat in my study without desire for sleep, staring with burning eyes at the silk curtains fluttering in the June night wind, until they seemed to be ghosts dancing on my window sills, and my straining ears listened to the hourly booming of the clock on the Fidelity Tower, until it sounded like the cruel voice of Time itself. Long after the rosy dawn I got up, drank some water, lit a strong cigar, and prepared to dress myself for the day's work. I can well remember my determination never again to expose my feelings toward any living soul and my constantly repeated assertion to myself that I had been hasty and indiscreet, that I did not in truth any longer love Julianna and had been punished for a breach of that reserve and caution which had been a virtuous characteristic of my ancestors.

With my teeth shut together, with a frenzy to accomplish much work, without a breakfast, and with sharp and perhaps ill-tempered commands to my assistants, I spent the morning in the preparation of cases for which trials were pending. By noon the heat of the day had become intense, the sides of the battalions of towering buildings across the narrow street seemed to become radiators for the viciousness of the summer sun, the voices of newsboys, the murmur of the lunch-hour crowd twanged a man's nerves, and I noticed for the first time the devilish song of the electric fan on my wall. As you have foreseen, I felt suddenly the wilting of my will. Tired, hungry, sleepless, I slipped down into my chair, and there seemed no happiness left in a world which did not include the girl I had left the night before.

I seized my hat and, clapping it on my head, I stopped only to sweep the papers into the desk drawers and hurried toward the elevator.

"There's somebody on the 'phone for you, Mr. Estabrook," said the switchboard girl. "They're very anxious to talk."

"Tell 'em I've gone home for the day," I called back to her and then went down and out of the building to the sunbaked street.

I knew that I should put food in my stomach, so I ate a lunch somewhere. I knew I should rest, but the thought of returning to my bachelor rooms suggested only a violent mental review of the events through which I had been. I was tempted to go to the Monument, but flung the idea aside as a piece of sentimental madness. Accordingly I walked toward the river front with its uninteresting and sordid warehouses, saloons and boxes, bales and crates of the wholesale produce commissioners. On that long, cobblestoned thoroughfare, with its drays and commercial riffraff, its lounging stevedores, its refuse barrels, its gutter children and its heat, I went forward mile after mile, without much thought of where I went or why I chose such surroundings for my way, unless it was that the breeze from the water was welcome to me.

The late afternoon found me on an uptown pier, watching the return of an excursion steamer, proud with flags and alive with children, girls with sunburned faces and young men with handkerchiefs tucked around their collars and carrying souvenir canes. They disembarked down a narrow gangplank, like ants crawling along a straw. I reflected that all were, like myself, with their individual comedies and tragedies, the representatives of the countless, forgotten, and ever reproducing millions of human gnats that through unthinkable periods of time come and go. I had seen none of them before. I would see none of them again. Instead of being a depressing notion, I found this a cheerful idea; I welcomed the evidence of my own insignificance. I laughed. I even determined to amuse myself. If nothing better offered, I made up my mind I would visit the Sheik of Baalbec, and, by pitting my skill against his, prove that I could exclude, when I wished, the haunting thoughts to which my mind had been a prey.

"The Sheik, then," said I, after a block or two. "It was he who ushered me into this affair. It shall be he who may say an end to it."

In the light of what followed, this sentence, murmured half aloud as I walked, has many times caused me to wonder at the prophetic voice with which we sometimes carelessly address ourselves.

I found the museum, except for the red-nosed attendant and the pale pink girl in the ticket window, deserted. The accursed automaton, I feared, would be closed for business, and therefore it was with satisfaction that I noticed that the coin slot was open, and that, having dropped in my tribute to genius, chess, and machinery, I heard the squeak of the moving mechanism and the brown, jointed fingers of the figure scraping across the board.

I cannot believe that the Sheik was playing his best game. At the end of a half-hour, when the machinery stopped to notify me that another coin was due, I had a decided advantage in position. Before another fifteen minutes, during which we both played rapidly, had gone, the issue was no longer in doubt and I stopped.

"Ha!" said I, aloud. "You will not wink at me this time. Is there any other game you can play better than you play this?"

The automaton was silent.

I cannot say what impelled me to suggest it, but I drew a piece of paper and a pencil out of my pocket and said, "Can you write?"

The door in the chest of the Sheik flew open then for a moment as if to expose his heart to me. Though I had put no coin into the machine, I saw the levers and gears start to move again, the door of that pulmonary cavity was closed and the brown fingers jerked their way forward.

"Not only can write, but is anxious to do so," I remarked, as I extended the pencil and laid the paper on the chessboard.

For a second or two I waited, as the hand of the mechanical creature wrote a few words: I remember that during those seconds I heard a clock somewhere striking six. I did not make any attempt to see beforehand what he had chosen to inscribe, for I assumed that it would be some empty answer to my bantering remarks. At last the pencil dropped upon the board and rolled under one of the cross-legged creature's red Turkish slippers, the whirr of the mechanism stopped abruptly, and I picked up the writing.

Having read the scrawl once I believed myself out of my wits. I could not credit my eyes. I could not gather my reason. I was breathless, transfixed!

I looked up at the face of the Sheik and found that, in place of the malicious wink with which he proclaimed himself a victor in a game of draughts, his glass eyes, with their whites in sharp contrast to his swarthy wax skin, were both wide open and set in a glare of such ferocity and malign hatred that they seemed to flash the fire of life and lighten the gloom of the corner with rays of evil.

I laughed. I forced myself to laugh, but it was with no mirth, and then, hesitating for a moment and seized by the temptation to tear the automaton to shreds, to discover what was within its exterior, I turned, crunched the paper in my closed fist, and almost ran out through the lines of wax figures—the Garibaldis, the Jenny Linds, the Louis Napoleons, and the Von Moltkes—into the sunlight.

No man can blame me for my excitement or even my terror, for the Sheik had written, "You are in danger! Withdraw before it is too late, and never see the old man or child of his again!"

Had the time been the Middle Ages, or the place a strange quarter of the Orient, I might not have been so shocked at the knowledge which a tawdry machine, or the mountebank behind it, seemed to have of the affairs of persons against whom no charge of contact with the lower strata of life could be brought. But in our civilization, where nothing but the commonplace is to be expected, I was wholly unnerved.

"Come," said I to myself, having walked to the far side of the open square, "sit on this bench, unfold the paper, and use your intelligence to overcome the hysteria which last night's experience and this odd affair of the Sheik have aroused. Be sensible. This message is a matter to be explained, just as all things are to be explained by any one who is not the victim of superstitious fear."

This determination immediately cleared my reason. After all, there was nothing to solve.

"Whoever controls the mechanism has seen me with the Judge," said I, "and doubtless has heard him mention his daughter, and perhaps has observed the effect of her name on me. Furthermore, he, or, as the Judge said, the man or woman behind the Sheik, has even seen me with Julianna and might well have drawn conclusions. The message was written in ill temper or as a piece of malicious mischief. And there's an end to it!"

Whereupon I tore the scrap across the middle and, dropping it in the grass, I started toward my home.

The picture of that writing, however, was too clearly photographed upon my vision; it continually wrote itself on the walls of buildings, upon the pavement or across the sky. And as it did, little by little, it began to dawn upon me that the handwriting with which it had been executed I had seen before.

When at last, from the back of my mind, I recalled the occasion, I astonished those persons who were walking near me by stopping in the middle of the sidewalk as if stricken and uttering a sharp exclamation. My hand sought the contents of my inside coat pocket; among the papers there I found the note which Julianna, wishing me to see her father, had written me, and with trembling fingers I spread the sheet before me.

One look was all that was necessary, for it sent me hurrying back the way I had come; it was enough to cause me to kneel down on the grass in the gathering gloom that was filling the old square. Where I had sat a half-hour before, I now searched frantically for bits of torn paper.

I found both pieces at last, placed them side by side and compared them with the note in my hand. I have already told you that Julianna wrote a hand distinguished from others by subtle peculiarities. The message from the Sheik was written as she would write!

To believe, as I found I must believe, that she, with or without the knowledge of the Judge, would so far forget the obligations of her place in society as to operate a vulgar puppet in public, no matter how much it might interest or amuse her, was another shock to me. I am free to confess that, in spite of all my former assertions to myself that I had not loved her as much as I had supposed, this new development was the first that began to make me believe I had been blinded by mere infatuation.

"You have been moving in the dark," I told myself. "You have stifled your senses from a whole set of facts which tend to show that some unwholesome thing is sleeping on the threshold of the Colfax home. Perhaps, after all, Julianna and the Sheik of Baalbec are right. It has come out for the best."

And yet, hardly had I so thought than a strange sense of loneliness came over me, the dingy buildings about the square seemed like so many squatting personalities, depressed and brooding, and out of that gloomy picture came the image of Julianna, so fresh, so smiling, and so fair that for a moment I almost forgot that it was a creation of my fancy. It brought back to me my love for her. I remembered my promise to the Judge. I recalled her tenderness and purity, which I had felt so strongly that I had expected to see it about her like an effulgence. I cursed myself for doubting her. I looked upon the evidence of the scrap of paper in my hand as a piece of testimony brought against an innocent person. Not only with the instinct of a lover, but that of a lawyer as well, I determined to defend her from my own accusations.

I had not been without the necessity, once or twice in my practice, of calling upon experts in handwriting; now I remembered that one of them, a clever fellow named Jarvis, lived in an apartment not far from mine. It was the dinner hour. I believed I should find him and I was right.

"I have come on a peculiar errand," I explained to him as he appeared in his library, napkin in hand, "and if you are not through dinner, I will wait."

"No, no," said he, with easy falsehood. "I had just finished. How can I help you, Mr. Estabrook?"

"I wish your opinion on two pieces of handwriting," I answered. "It is unnecessary for me to tell you where I got them, you understand. The question at issue is, did one person write both, and if not, is one of them an imitation of the other?"

He flourished a powerful reading-glass in the professional manner those fellows use and gave the two specimens a cursory examination.

"The problem should not be difficult," he said, "since both were written hastily. In the case of the pencil, it is clear from the manner in which the fine fibres of the paper are brushed forward like grass leaning in the wind. In the case of the ink, the wet pen has gone back to cross a t or complete an imperfectly formed letter before the earlier strokes had time to dry."

"That would preclude imitation?" I asked.

"Why, yes. Offhand, I should say so—unless the one who made the attempt had practiced for years, or has the skill of imitation developed beyond that of any professional forger. But give me a moment, please."

I waited, tapping with my fingers on the chair arm.

He straightened up at last, with a sigh, then looked at me with his eyebrows drawn and a look of perplexity on his thin, cadaverous face.

"It's very odd," said he.

"What's very odd?"

"Well, Mr. Estabrook, these pieces were not written several years apart—at different periods of life, were they?"

"Why, no," said I.

"They are not the work of one person, then," he said, with firm conviction. "I would stake my reputation on that."

"Then one is an attempt to imitate the other?" I said, stifling a glad exclamation.

"That's the rub," said he. "And, to be frank, I might spend a month without being able to say which was the imitated and which the imitating. I would almost think you had stumbled on two specimens which, merely by coincidence, bore a wonderful resemblance to each other. It lies between that and the cleverest, most practiced forgery I have ever seen."

You may be sure that his decision gave me a sense of triumph; without speculating as to the truth, it was enough for me to know that Julianna had not, as I had at first suspected, been a party to this vulgar and melodramatic flourish. I berated myself for having entertained any doubt and now felt anew, and with aggravation, my affection for her. This outcome of my adventure with the Sheik, in fact, restored my spirit, made me forget my pride, and, as you will see, was enough to put me in condition to receive that which was about to befall me.



CHAPTER IV

THE FACE

My thoughts as I entered the portico of that building where I had my apartments were not only of Julianna, but were also in those channels where I have no doubt your own opinion of my narrative must run. I freely admit, as I then was forced to admit, that my lovemaking had been attended with many bizarre and abnormal happenings; yet at the time I sneered at the questions which rose in my own mind and bravely asserted to myself that the chances of winning Julianna were not wholly lost.

In the lower hall of the building in which I had quarters there were stationed until six at night a telephone operator and a doorman. Perhaps you have noticed that I tell you these matters in considerable detail, and I will continue to do this, because my natural dread of disclosing the intimate affairs of my life has kept me heretofore from sharing my story with any one, and now that I have lifted the cover and drawn the veil of my experience, I can only find justification, in so narrating the sequence of extraordinary events, by observing the strictest adherence to detail and accuracy in the hope that perhaps you, by the virtue of a fresh and unprejudiced viewpoint, may be able to unravel some of the tangle in which I am, even now, enmeshed.

As I have said, at six the telephone girl at the switchboard and the doorman, for some reason which I could never understand, were replaced by an old negro who served as both, and who was the most garrulous, indiscreet individual I have ever seen.

As if to affirm these characteristics he spoke to me the moment I had entered, in a voice which seemed to be adapted to a general address to the three or four other bachelors who were waiting in the frescoed vestibule for a conveyance.

"Yaas, sah, Mr. Estabrook, sah. De dohman lef' a message, sah. Der has been a lady waitin' foh you, sah, mos' all de ahfternoon. She comin' back, she say—dis evenin'. She sutt'nly act very queer, sah."

"All right," I snapped. "It's one of my clients."

"Um-um," he said, shaking his head. "I spec she ain't, Mr. Estabrook, sah. She mos' likely has pussonal business, sah!"

The others—Folsom the broker, and Madison, and Ingle the architect—had evidently dined well, preparing for a musical comedy, and they snickered without shame.

"Let my man know when she comes," said I, and without smiling hurried into the elevator.

I had no belief that the woman, whoever she might be, would come back after dark to call upon me. With my conflicting thoughts about Julianna, I forgot the incident. It was therefore with some surprise that I heard Saito, my Jap, arouse me from my sleepy reverie, to which exhaustion had reduced my mind, to tell me that a lady was waiting in the reception room downstairs.

You may understand the conservative nature of my life and habits more thoroughly when I tell you that the mere idea that a woman had dared to ask for me at my apartment in the evening caused me the greatest anxiety. As if to prove what dependence we can put upon our intuitions, I felt, on my way down, most strongly, that an evil event was about to take place.

Nothing could, I think, better illustrate the nonsense of attaching importance to these fore-warnings than to tell you that the woman who waited for me was Julianna herself!

My first instinct, before I had been seen by her, was to hurry her out of the garish little reception room, where, through the door which opened into the hallway, she might well have been seen by anybody; it was only when she greeted me and turned her face toward the tiled floor, and I saw that her shoulders drooped and that her hands hung down at her side, and that she stood like a guilty, punished, and remorseful child, that my wish to protect her was displaced by a mad desire to take her in my arms and comfort her.

"Julianna!" I cried. "What has happened? Is it the Judge? Tell me! Why did you come?"

She shook her head and lowered it still more, until the sweeping curve of her bare neck, from the fine hair behind her ears to the back of the lace collar of her waist, was visible.

I cannot say what gave me the courage, but I bent over her and kissed her there, softly.

She looked up then without the slightest indication of either surprise or reproach.

"I liked that," she whispered. "I didn't know how I was going to tell you, but now I can."

"Tell me what?" said I, in a choking voice.

"I love you," she said. "I could not let you go. I thought last night that I could carry it through. I thought my duty was to stay with father. But it isn't!"

"And you came here to tell me!" I gasped.

"Why not?" she said, with a catch in her voice. "I was afraid I would never see you again and I love you."

When I think of all the sham there is among women, I treasure the memory of that simple little explanation. It was delivered as a full answer to all the conventionalities from here back to the time of the Serpent. It was spoken in a low but confident voice, with her hands upon her breast as if to calm the emotions within, and was directed toward me with the first frank exposure of her eyes which were still wet with tears.

"I have been miserable!" she said. "A woman is meant for some man, after all. And if she resists, she is resisting God! It all has been shown to me so clearly. And I knew that you were the one. There's nothing else that makes any difference, and it sweeps you off your feet, so it must be nature, because it gave me the courage to telephone you and then try to find you and come here and wait and come again, and only nature can make any one go against all her habits and education. And I believe I'll call you Jerry, if you still—"

"Good God! Love you?" said I. "Forever!"

"Always?"

"Forever."

She gave her burning hands to mine, and oblivious of the old negro, whose eyes were upon us, we stood there, looking at each other in awe, very much frightened and very much, for that moment,—and I sometimes wonder if not in truth,—the centre of the universe.

"You belong to me, Jerry?" she said tearfully. "Now?"

"Yes," said I.

"Then I must go back quickly," she explained, after a moment. "I do not want father to know yet. I want to prepare the way. I don't want you to speak with him for a week. I will tell him then. Perhaps you think it is strange. But Friday, when he knows, you may come."

She had a carriage waiting for her, and I walked with her to its door.

"I want to kiss you, Julianna," I whispered.

She looked up to see whether the driver could observe us. He could not. And then the mischief-loving quality of womankind appeared in her. She gave forth a glad little laugh.

"On Friday," she said.

The door slammed, and I thought, as I caught a last glance at her then, that she was a luminous being of dreams, lighting the dark recess of a common cab.

This impression recurred so often in those following days that at times there rose the uncanny suspicion that the woman who had visited me had not been one of reality, of flesh and blood, and beating heart and sweet, warm breath. Her smile, her voice, her personality had not seemed a part of real life, but almost the manifestations of a spirit which, timidly and with the hope of some reincarnation in life, had come to claim my vows. I believed that I knew well enough why Julianna, if it were she, had planned to avoid a sudden disclosure of our betrothal to the Judge, but, none the less, I fretted at the sluggishness of time, which, like a country horse, will not go faster for the wishing or the beating.

I wished, too, that she had said she would meet me in her afternoon walks to the Monument and wondered that, if she loved me, she was able to forbid herself a meeting, even though she had felt that good sense demanded a period of reflection and a readjustment of view, so that when we did see each other again, it would be with firmer minds and steadier hearts. I would have gladly foregone all this value of reserve and restraint for one look at her face, one touch of her sleeve, one word from her tender, curving lips.

And yet I was happy in those days—so painfully happy that I heard voices telling me that such happiness does not last, that ecstasies are tricks of fate by which man's joy is fattened for slaughter, that from some ambush a horrible thing was peering.

Strangely enough, these fears were connected in no way with the warnings which I had had from my eavesdropping or even from the definite threat which had come out of my grotesque experience with the Sheik of Baalbec. The piece of writing, which had begun, "You are in danger," I had dropped into a file of papers, and though I suppose it is somewhere among them now, I have never yielded to the temptation to look at it again. I may have thought of it merely to add to the opinion of Jarvis that the writing was not Julianna's, the apparently indisputable fact that, at the moment the warning had been written, Julianna was, by the word of the apartment house doorman, waiting for me in the little reception room. Furthermore, with my success in winning her, with the intoxication of it, I began to look upon the strange and unexplained matters which had so perplexed me as trivial illusions beneath the consideration of good sense. However much you may be surprised at my willful blindness, your wonder cannot equal that which I myself feel to-night.

And now, when I am about to tell you of that memorable Friday, I must impress upon you that no detail of it is distorted in my memory, that so clear and vivid were the impressions upon my senses that, were I to live to the age of pyramids, I could recall every slight sequence with accuracy. I say this because you are a physician and as such, no doubt,—and it is no different in the case of us lawyers,—have learned the absurd fallibility of ordinary human testimony, not excluding that which proceeds from the highest and most honorable type of our civilization.

The day, as I was about to tell you, had been saved from the heat of the season by a breeze which blew from the water and once or twice even reached the velocity of a storm wind. A hundred times I had looked out my office window and a hundred times I had seen that not one speck of cloud showed in the sky. Yet all day long, while I tried to work, only to find myself all on edge with expectancy, I could hear the flap and rustle of the American flag on the Custom-House roof, which was straining at its cords and lashing itself into a frenzy like a wild creature in chains.

I am not sure that a dry storm of this kind is not freighted with some nerve-twanging quality. I have often noticed on such days a universal irritability on the part of mankind, and I have been informed by those who have traveled much that often a nervous wind of this kind, in countries where such things happen, precedes some disaster such as volcanic eruptions, avalanches, earthquakes, and tidal waves.

My own nervousness, however, took the form of impatience. I was absurdly eager to go at once to Julianna, and the fact that the hour for dinner had finally arrived, and that the remaining time was short, only served to increase my impatience the more. I could not assign any cause for this other than my wish to see Julianna, for now I knew in my mind and heart, by reason and by instinct, that the Judge had been right, that once having given her love she had given all, and, with that noble and perhaps pathetic trait of fine women, would never change.

At last I found myself at her door, at last she herself had opened it, and was smiling at me—as beautiful, more beautiful, than I had ever seen her. I remember that, with an innocent and spontaneous outburst of affection, she caught my hand in hers and tucked it under her soft round arm in playful symbolism of capture.

"You must not say a word to me," she said. "I have never been so happy! But he is in there. He wants to see you alone and you must hurry."

"Hurry?" I protested.

"I don't know why," she said, with a nervous little laugh. "I suppose it's because I want you to talk to him and come to me as quickly as you can."

Then, with a gentle pressure from behind, she pushed me through the curtains into the familiar study and I heard her feet scampering up the soft carpet on the broad, black-walnut stairs.

The Judge was sitting in his easy-chair beside the table. A book was open on his knees, a long-stemmed pipe was on the chair arm, and the gray and grizzled old dog lay, with head on paws, at his feet. Above him a huge wreath of thin smoke hung in the air. Had I been a painter, I should have wished to lay that picture upon canvas, because seldom could one see expressed so completely the evening of an honest day and of an honorable life, the tranquillity of home, the comfort of meditation, the affection for faithful dog, old volume, and seasoned pipe.

As he looked up at me, however, it suddenly seemed to me that he had grown old; behind his smile of warm greeting I fancied I could observe a haunted look, the ghostly flickering forth of some unwelcome thought held in the subconsciousness.

"Why, Estabrook!" he cried, when he had seen me. "Bless my soul, I didn't know you would be so prompt. I have understood that young men approached these interviews with reluctance."

"You forget, sir," I answered, knowing that he would have a jest at my expense, "that we made the arrangement in advance."

"We did! We did! That's a fact. But I had no idea that you would be successful, at least so soon, and if I may say it—so—so—precipitously."

"I plead the spirit of the age," said I.

"It's a spirit common to all ages, I take it," he answered, with a quirk of his judicial mouth. "Do I understand that you and my daughter have first become engaged and now wish my permission to see enough of each other to become acquainted?"

Perhaps he hit a centre ring with this thrust, for I could only stammer forth an awkward statement about being very sure of my feelings.

"They all are sure!" he said, with a good-natured cynicism. Then he smiled again and pointed toward the ceiling with a long forefinger. "Perhaps you may be pleased to know that she is very sure," he whispered.

I sat down.

"Yes," said he solemnly. "You are to be envied. I believe her love—as I have seen it grow in these weeks—is the sweetest thing that ever flowed from a human soul."

"You knew that she at first sent me away in the name of her duty to you?" said I.

He looked up at me, shut his book, patted the dog, and laid the pipe on the table.

"No," said he, with a break in his voice. "But I shall not quickly forget that you have been fair enough to her and to me to tell me that."

"May I have her?" I asked.

"Yes," said he. "Of course you may."

I hesitated a moment. Then I laughed. "She told me when you had said that to go to her."

I rose.

"Wait," said he. "That is not all. Before God, I wish it were."

I had not been watching his expression, but now, when I looked up at him, I saw that the gray look which I had fancied I had seen under his smile had now come out upon his face.

"Estabrook," he said, leaning forward toward me with his lips compressed, "sometime, perhaps years from now, perhaps never, but, if you choose, to-night—you may know what a problem I have had to solve, and what it will cost me to say to you that which I am going to say."

He had lowered his voice as if he wished to be sure that no one could overhear him, and now, when he stopped, he stood with his head turned as if listening to be sure that no one was in the hallway. No sounds came, however, except those of the dog, who whined softly in his dreams, and the complaint of the dry wind, which, instead of diminishing with night, had perhaps increased its intensity, and the rattle of the long French windows through which I could see the gnarled old wistaria vine clinging desperately to the iron balcony, its leaves tossing about as if in agony.

"I have sat on the bench for many years, trying with my imperfect intelligence to adjust the misshapen affairs of men and women," the Judge went on. "Never have I been forced to deal with so terrible a question as lies before me now—to-night."

For a long time, then, he was silent. Finally I spoke.

"Judge," said I, "how can I help?"

"I am afraid," he said slowly, and apparently avoiding my gaze,—"I am afraid that I must call upon you in a manner which will severely weigh upon you. Estabrook," he put his hand upon my shoulder. "I've done my best. Do you hear? I've done my best."

"I will never doubt it," I assured him. "Nor do you need to doubt me."

He looked at me steadily for a second; then he went to a drawer and, opening it, took out a packet of folded papers. It was evident that he had placed it there so that he could reach it easily.

I suppose that the gravity of his bearing, the trembling of his hands, in which these papers rustled, and the anxious expression with which he gazed at me, as if I were to decide some question of life or death, infected me with his unrest. I got up, paced back and forth, and finally sat down again facing his empty easy-chair, with my back to the long windows.

The Judge watched every movement I made, his eyes staring out at me from under the brush of their brows. At last, when I had seated myself, he came and sat in front of me, laid the papers on his knees and smoothed them with the palm of his shaking hand.

"My boy," he said, "I wrote these papers, not for you, but for my Julianna. Never has a man had a task so calculated to break his heart. She was not to read my message to her unless death came and took me, for while I lived, I felt that I might spare her. See! Her name is written across this outside page."

I could find no words to fill the pauses which he seemed obliged to make, for, as you may well believe, I felt the presence of a crisis in my affairs—in the affairs of all of us.

"But, my boy," he went on, "what these pages contain is now for you, if you so decide."

"Decide?" I managed to say. "What must I decide?"

"I will tell you if God gives me the strength to do it," he said. "It is about Julianna. It is written here. I have sealed it as you see."

"Something about her?" I cried.

He bent his head as if I had struck him from above.

"You may break the seal if you must. I have fought many battles to bring myself to tell you that you may read what is there."

I reached for the package.

"Wait," said he. "The contents of this document need never be given to her if she becomes your wife. Nor is it necessary for you to read what is there set forth if you only will choose not to do so. These are strange words between men in these modern times, Estabrook. But I have guarded my honor carefully all my life. And now, though the temptation has been almost more than I could stand, as you may believe some day,—or perhaps know in the next five minutes, which are walking toward us out of eternity,—yet I have determined that you should know everything if you chose."

"I do choose," I said firmly.

He shrunk back as if I had struck at him again.

"Think!" he begged. "No good can come of your knowledge. It cannot avert harm if harm must come. And more—be cool in your judgment, or you may ruin all of us."

"But, Judge Colfax," I cried out, "your proposal of choice is empty. One cannot reject or accept the unknown."

"It must be so," said he. "There is an astounding fact about Julianna which you do not know. About that fact I have written this message, so that when I had gone she might be prepared in case the worst—in case the worst—the improbable—the unexpected, the unthinkable—should come."

I caught the arms of the chair in the grip of my two hands and tried to think, but I could find no reason for my remaining, perhaps for a lifetime, in ignorance of some unseen menace to the woman I loved. I think that I was about to tell him that nothing could change my feelings for Julianna, or shake my faith in her, that it was right that I should become her defender, and that I, therefore, must know what hung so threateningly over her. Words were on my tongue, when suddenly the Judge bent his great frame forward and was in another second half kneeling on the floor in front of me, his hands clutching my coat. His face then was the color of concrete, and the dignity which he had worn so long had slipped from him as an unloosened garment falls.

"For her sake!" he whispered. "For her sake, don't go further. Let the thing be unspoken. My boy, don't dig up that which is all but buried forever. Listen to me, Estabrook. You trust me. And I, tell you that if I were in your place, knowing what I know—"

"Enough," I said, awed by his pleading. "Do you tell me that it is best for her and for me to make her my wife in ignorance of this thing?"

"God help me," he said, falling back into his chair.

He seemed to be thinking desperately, as if some voice had told him that only a moment was left for thought. At last he threw his long arms outward.

"Yes," said he. "I tell you that it is better for you and for her to know nothing."

"That is sufficient," I said. "I ask no more."

He shut his eyes as one would receive the relief of an opiate after long agony of the body and for some moments he remained so, his hands, from which the packet of papers had fallen, relaxed upon his knees. The starched white shirt he wore crackled absurdly with each long inhalation of breath.

In those moments a tumult of thoughts went tumbling through my brain, and as the seconds passed, I almost felt that it was the wind that howled outside which was blowing these thoughts over each other, as it would blow dry autumn leaves.

At last the dog rose, stretched himself, and, as if restless, sought here and there a new place to lie, and the sound of his claws upon the polished floor recalled the Judge from his almost unconscious reverie. He half opened his eyes and once or twice moved his thin lips. At last he spoke and into those commonplace words he put all the meaning which hours of ranting would have made less plain.

"I am grateful," he said.

When I looked up at him after lowering my head in acknowledgment of his thanks, I saw again that wonderful smile of benevolence, which, given to me once before in his office, I believe could only have been bestowed by one who had had a lifelong practice in love of humanity. Indeed, he only directed it at me for a moment, and then turned his face a little aside toward the back of the room, as if he wished to send that expression through the walls and spread over the whole world its beaming radiance.

You may, then, well imagine my surprise when, without a word or a motion of any other part of his body, I saw that smile fade from his face. It disappeared as if a blast of the night wind, entering the room, had dried it, crumbled it, and blown it away. In its place I now saw the terrible, eye-widened, and fixed stare which we recognize as the facial sign of some abject, unreasoning terror, or of death, after the clutch of some fatal agony.

"Judge Colfax!" I exclaimed.

I waited. I thought I saw his head move a little as if he had heard me, but with that motion there came a click, the sound of teeth coming together.

"You are ill," I said, half rising from my chair.

His lips moved, but the stare in his eyes remained the same.

"It has come," he said in his throat.

I jumped toward him. He did not stir.

"Judge!" I cried.

He did not answer. I waited, bending over him, not daring to guess what had befallen him, holding my breath. Then, cautiously, I moved my fingers before his eyes: they did not wink. I placed my hand over his heart.... It was as still as a rundown clock. The room itself was still. The wind had paused a moment as if for this.... The Judge was dead. And yet because he still sat there, his gray head resting on the cushions, and because he stared so fixedly before him, I could not grasp the fact of death. I had never met it face to face before. I could not honor its credentials.

For a moment I stood in front of the old man, with the single thought that our extraordinary interview had been too much for him: it never occurred to me to go for assistance any more than it occurred to me that death, unlike sleep, was a permanent thing, from which the Judge would never come back again. I simply stood there, awed by the presence of death, yet crediting death with none of death's attributes.

And as I stood, my attention became more and more fixed upon the Judge's stare. It did not seem to be a vacant gaze; on the contrary, it seemed to contain something. It seemed not only fixed; it seemed fixed on some object. It looked past me, behind me, and there, with all its terror and all its intelligence, it rested, motionless. It seemed to refute the notion that dead men cannot see; it seemed to affirm that dead men's eyes are not dead. Into that terrible stare I looked, fascinated, awed, hushed, motionless. Then, suddenly, I heard the dog.



The great Scotch hound had been snarling. He had growled, for I remembered it as a fact brought out of the background of my consciousness. And when I tore my eyes away from the Judge's stare, I saw that the dog was staring, too,—was staring, was drawing back his black lips, exposing his yellow teeth. Every hair on his back was erect, his nostrils were distended as if he were relying upon his sense of smell to determine the nature of what he saw. Could there be any doubt that he, living, and his master, dead, still saw something—something which, because it was behind me, I could not see?

At first I did not dare to look. I felt some dreadful presence behind me—a presence upon which the lifeless man and the cringing, snarling beast had set their eyes, a presence which had wiped the smile from the Judge's face and tightened every nerve and sinew in the dog's lean body. I could hear the wind, and, in its lapses, the rumble of the city, I could smell the warm aroma of the Judge's pipe, I could feel my senses grow keener as I gathered my courage to look over my shoulder.

When at last, after that dragging moment's reluctance, I did so, I believed that I had looked for no purpose. The room behind me was empty. My nervous eyes searched the rectangular space, swept over the chairs, the tea-table covered with its display of rare china, the blue-and-gold Japanese floor vase, the brasses on the cases of books, the dark walls, the pictures, the gloomy corners filled with the mist of shadows, the rugs, the cornice, the draperies.

Then suddenly I saw!

Outside the long French windows, framed in the uncertain outlines of the old ornate balcony rail and the tossing leaves and branches of the vine, there appeared, as if it had come floating out of the liquid blackness of the night, detached from all else, a face.

No sooner had my glance fallen upon this peering countenance than I thought I saw a startled opening of its lips; it withdrew and was gone. I had merely caught a glance at it, yet of this I am sure—the face was white with the pallor of things that grow in a cellar, it was weak with the terrible drooping, hopeless weakness of endless self-indulgence; it was a brutal face, and yet wore the expression of timid, anxious, pathetic inquiry. It was a face that had come to ask a question. And though, because only the pale skin had reflected the light from within, I had not seen what might have appeared above or below, and though I may have been wrong, I received the impression that it was the countenance of an old woman.

Of course the moment I discovered this apparition, upon which the wild stare of the Judge in life and in death had rested, I ran forward. I thought as I did so that I heard the scrape of clothing on the iron balcony rail and the thud of a heavy object dropping on the grass below. Flinging open the glass doors, through which a torrent of wind poured into the room, and leaning out under the twisted branches of the vine, I tried in vain to penetrate the wall of blackness before me, and force my sight through it and down into the old garden, from which there arose only the rushing sound of the dry wind in the shrubbery. All the universe seemed made of black and hissing chaos. Out of it came blasts that combed through my disheveled hair and drove fine dust into my eyes. But of the messenger of death, who had peered in the window for a moment, and then withdrawn, nothing could be seen.

I turned back, feeling suddenly, for the first time, the emptiness of body which occurs, perhaps in sympathy with the emptiness of death, and as I turned, I found myself in the position of the thing that had looked in at us. The stare of the Judge was still fixed upon that spot, so that for a moment I received the impression that he was gazing at me. The dog still whined softly, cowering close to the floor.

I went to the middle of the room: I stood there gathering my wits. I heard a clock strike somewhere in the kitchen region below, from outside the window came the rattle of some conveyance, louder, louder, softer, softer. A passing boy whistled; I heard Julianna's step above me; I heard the dog licking his paws unconcernedly; I heard the curtains flap in the wind that filled the room; and finally its ironical little scream as it lifted from the desk the last opinion the Judge ever wrote and scattered the loose sheets all over the room. It brought in the dank smell of the garden.

"I must tell her," I said aloud, and the old dog, senses dulled by age, wagged his tail. "I must tell her," I repeated, and toiled up the soft, carpeted stairs.

She was waiting for me in her own room, standing under the soft light from a hanging, well-shaded, electric lamp. I see her there, clearly, with the smile fading from her face as she read my own. Indeed, it was not necessary for me to speak; before I had gathered courage to do so, I saw her bosom swell with a long breath. She inhaled it jerkily, as one who is suddenly shocked with a deluge of icy water. I saw the color fade as the smile had faded before it, and when I had nodded to indicate that she had guessed the truth, stepped forward, fearing that she would sway off her feet.

"No, Jerry," she said, with her hands held tight at her sides. "I am all right. I had expected this some day soon. It is hard to believe, but has not come without warning. His heart—his great, loving heart—had—worn out. I do not want you to come with me. I am going down—alone."

I moved my dry tongue in my mouth: a word of the strange circumstance of his death was there. But her courage—her steady body, her squared shoulders, her firm mouth, her eyes which showed her agony, but no sign of weakness, and her soft voice as she said, "Wait for me here"—restrained me. I pressed her fingers to my lips and as I saw her go out, I felt that perhaps never would the opportunity to tell the story I have told to-night come again.



CHAPTER V

AT DAWN

I think it must have been nearly a half-hour—though the minutes were themselves hours—before I, waiting in the upper hall beside the window, through which the arc lights from the street threw jumping white patches on the ceiling, heard the sound of the old dog's claws on the floor below and her little catches of breath as she came up.

At the top she buried her face for a moment on my shoulder.

"I love you more than ever," she whispered. "I want you to stay.—Call Margaret and do what you can. I will come to you by and by."

With these words she pressed my forearm in the grip of her strong fingers and, entering her own room, shut the door.

I found, when I did mechanically as she had bade me do, that Margaret, with the instinct of an old servant, which is sometimes as keen as that of an animal, had already sensed the presence of some crisis and prowled about in her soft-footed way until she had discovered the truth. She was lying at the bottom of the stairs, her face buried in her hands and her broad back rising and falling with slow and silent tides of grief. Julianna and her father were together the old woman's life. One half had gone.

"Come, Margaret," said I softly.

"Very well, sir," she answered after a minute, and rising, straightened her cap, preparing for duty like a broken-hearted soldier. And so she went on in that next hour or two, telephoning, directing, arranging and doing with me all those necessary things. In spite of her labors she seemed always to be at my elbow, a ceaseless little whimpering in her throat. Her spectacles were befogged with the mist from her old blue eyes, which, like the color of old china, had faded with wetting and drying in years of family use, but she did not again give up to her grief.

Therefore, when at last we looked at each other in the hall in one of those moments when, at the end of a task, a mental inventory is taken to be sure that all is done, I was surprised to see her expression change suddenly, to hear a cry of dismay escape her, and to observe her trundle herself toward the library door in grotesque haste.

When, following her, I went into the room, I found her thick fingers pulling open drawer after drawer of the desk, and turning over the papers they contained.

"It was here, Mr. Estabrook. Oh, my God! Mr. Estabrook, I saw him put it here!" she cried.

"What?" I asked, with a glimmer of memory.

"The papers. They was marked for her, but she mustn't ever have 'em! I'd rather they should pluck me from my bones, sir! And I saw him put 'em here!"

"He took them out again," I cried, touched by her contagious fear. "He died with them on the floor beside him. I know what you mean. The blue seal."

"Yes, the blue seal!" she cried in recognition, and stumbling across the room she fell upon her knees, reaching under the old easy-chair and the desk, patting over the rug with her hand, turning up its corners, searching with her face bent down, like a devotee of some strange sect, muttering to herself.

"She must never see," she exclaimed monotonously. "Poor child, she must never see. It is worse than death—a hundred times. Oh, what has he done with that terrible package!"

Suddenly, throwing herself upward and backward, until the upper half of her body was erect, and with a small object held up to my astonished eyes between her forefinger and thumb, she uttered a cry of despair and rage. She had found a piece of the sealing wax with which the packet, once offered to my eyes, had been fastened!

"It's too late," she wailed miserably. "Do you see that? The girl has read it. She would not let me in her room. It's too late!"

There was no keeping back the question.

"What was in it?" I cried. "What was written there?"

I saw her old mouth shut as if she meant to show me that I need expect no disclosure from her.

"I don't know, Mr. Estabrook," said she.

In her eyes, perhaps distorted by the strong lenses of her glasses, I saw the challenge of stubbornness. I felt myself growing wild with a desire to break through the unwholesome mystery which had entangled me, and overcome by any means the silence of this woman. She had arisen. She was within my reach. And I believe that I put my hands upon her, catching her two round and fleshy shoulders under my curved palms, shaking her to and fro with the excess of my excitement. In that moment before I spoke to her, she looked up at me, surprise and terror written on her face.

"Tell me!" I roared. "You know this horrible, hidden thing. Confound you, tell me!"

Her expression changed. I saw surprise become craftiness and fear, distrust. I saw in her eyes the beginning of that hate which I believe has never, since that irresponsible moment, diminished.

"You had best leave go of me, Mr. Estabrook," she said calmly. "You would not act so if the old Judge was alive and here. Nor his daughter, sir!"

The rebuke, you may believe, was enough.

"I'm sorry," I said.

The old woman, however, wrung her hands and looked toward the room above as if to indicate to me that nothing was important but the fact that Julianna had possession of the Judge's post-mortem message.

"Let her tell you if she will," she cried. Then covering her face with her fat hands, as if to hide some terrible picture of the imagination, she stumbled forward out of the library.

I have often wondered since, as I wonder to-night, when those spectres have arisen again, what that old servant meant. At the time it never occurred to me that but one thing could happen. I had the utmost confidence in Julianna, and indeed, without thinking much of my own troubles, I passed that long vigil in the library only with regret that I could not wrest away from the true and noble woman who had promised to be my wife, all the terrible grief which, alone in the chamber above, she must have been suffering. For the first time, I think, in all my life, which, by training and inherited instincts, had been devoted, I might say, to the welfare of the Estabrook name and of myself, I felt my mind—and even my body—filled with a strange and passionate desire to be the instrument of good, not for myself, but in the name of others and perhaps in the name of God. My eyes filled with tears, springing not so much from grief as from belief in myself, not so much from weakness as from strength. I called upon an unknown force that I felt to be near me and directing me.

"Save her from misfortune," I said aloud in that silent room. "Protect her. Comfort her."

The old dog, as if he now understood, raised his head and licked my hand. I realized then that the wind had died down, and, looking up, I saw that the balcony and garden were lit by the pale rays of the morning moon, that the stars shone clearly again through the still air, and that the odor of flowers, nodding below the window, perfumed the Judge's study. The pipe, with ashes tumbling out upon the table, by curious chance had not been moved from the place where he had laid it down.

It seemed to me that I had dreamed restlessly, that the old man had not left the room, and then, when this fancy had gone, I almost believed that he had come back as he used to do when he, in his absent-minded way, had left something behind. With my heart full of him, I got up and reaching for the pipe I dropped it into my own pocket.

At last the oil in the lamp had been consumed. The burner flickered, gurgled several times, snapped, and went out; but the failure of this light served to show that morning was near at hand. The rectangular squares of the window panes now appeared luminous with the first gray flow of the east. It seemed to me that the time had come when Julianna should no longer be alone with her own thoughts; with soft steps I climbed the stairs and softly I turned the knob of her closed door. If it had been locked, it was so no longer; it yielded to my gentle, cautious pressure. The crack widened. Then, for a moment, unseen and unheard, I stood on the threshold looking in.

She was no longer dressed as I had seen her, for now she was clad in the soft drapery of some delicate Oriental silk, which, if she had been standing, would have fallen from the points of her shoulders in voluminous folds to the floor. She had unloosened her hair; it had fallen in a torrent of brown and golden light. I could not see her face.

Her back was turned toward me, for she was sitting on the floor facing the hearth in the middle of the frame of old lavender-and-gold tiles which marked the fireplace. Her hands were pressed to her temples as if her head no longer could be relied upon to retain its contents, her fingers moved this way and that through the hair above her ears, and, in strange contrast with the glimmer of early day beyond the white curtains, an uncanny flickering light burned on the hearth, painting the delicate pallor of her shoulders, neck, ears, and hands with an outline of fire. It was a picture to give the impression of a beautiful sorceress crouching to perform some unholy rite.

"Julianna!" I exclaimed softly.

She turned about as one caught red-handed in guilt, and in doing so, moved far enough to one side to expose the last remnants of written sheets of paper, which flames were rapidly consuming. A moment more and these were crisp ashes which whirled about the hearth with a soft rustle before they fell into heaps of sooty fragments. Whatever the Judge had written with infinite pain had now been destroyed. And as I looked into her eyes, I saw, too, that infinite pain had attended their destruction. Her expression had in it horror, shame, apprehension, and excruciating grief: never had I believed that a face, naturally so innocent and so happy, could have been so distorted with mature and terrible emotions as hers had become in the hours that had passed.

"Julie! my Julie!" I cried.

For answer her fingers reached out toward me in mute appeal, her body followed, and, crawling to my feet, she clutched the air as if trying to reach my hands with her own, and then fell forward, flat upon the floor, unconscious. If in that moment she appeared a groveling thing, it was only for a moment. Before I could stoop to raise her, she had regained her senses with two or three sharp inhalations and a fluttering of her eyelids, had thrust my hands from her and struggled to her feet.

"Go!" she whispered, retreating. "It is unthinkable! Go! Never come near me!"

"No—no—no!" I said. "Julianna, tell me! What has happened? It is not you who speaks!"

"No," she answered. "It is not I."

"I say it is not you who say these things," I repeated. "Who, then?"

"My father. It is his voice. It is his message. And what he has been, I am. There is no other way."

I moved toward her.

"Tell me this terrible menace behind us—this thing that threatens us—that works its evil upon us. I will not believe that any fault of it is yours."

"It is mine because it is his," she said, with a return of her wonderful self-control. "But no one shall ever hear of it from me—no—Jerry—not—even you."

"He offered to show me that message," I said. "I refused to see."

Another little cry issued from her compressed lips.

"You were willing not to know?"

"Yes."

She went into a corner; without taking her eyes away from mine, she wrung her hands, again and again.

"Why did I ever see you?" she whispered. "Why did I ever love you? Oh, go, while I am strong! Go, while I know that you must never ask for me again! Go, before I bargain with my conscience."

"You cannot send me away," I said. A thousand hidden horrors would not have daunted me then. "Will you treat my love for you so? Has your own gone so quickly?"

She shuddered then as if cold steel had been run through her body.

"I am lost," cried she. "I am lost. I cannot do more. Promise by your love of me,—by your love of God,—never to ask me of those things now ashes on the hearth—never to so much as speak of them to me—till eternity."

"What then?—I promise," I said.

"Then I will as solemnly swear to be as good and faithful, as true and ever-loving wife as God will let me be," she said softly; "and may He forgive me for what I do, because I love you."

She held out her arms to me, begging to be taken into mine, and when I had touched her she fell back, with her limp body in the curve of my elbow, and, looking up at me, offered her parted lips to the first kiss I had ever given her.



CHAPTER VI

THE MOVING FIGURE AGAIN

Such was a betrothal, sir, so extraordinary that had my natural repulsion for the unusual permitted me to have told it before, it would have been with belief that others would think me a man deluded by his own fancies. And yet these are facts I have told you—cold and bare and sufficient to have proved to me that the adventure and romance mourned for by some men are not dead, but, were it only known, still flourish, concealed in the hearts and experience of such matter-of-fact persons as myself.

Our marriage, too, was not of the conventional sort. It took place a fortnight later without any of the celebration usual in such cases. The death of the Judge, the fact that Julianna had no other immediate relatives to act as her protectors, and that my own father, whose affection for me has always been of a rather cold and undemonstrative type, approved not only of my choice of a wife, but also of my plan for an immediate marriage, argued against delay. Furthermore, Julianna herself, with a sad but charming little smile, again and again assured herself in my presence that she knew her own heart and that for her part there was no need to prolong a period of preparation.

Often, in those days, she spoke to me of her father, with the deepest affection, not as if he were dead, but rather as if his spirit still remained in the old house. She had one of those rare minds that reject the disagreeable superstitious affectations concerning death and that overcome hysterical grief. To be sure, for hours at a time she would suffer an extraordinary melancholy, and then, in my agony of curiosity, I believed that the spectre which had first appeared before her, the night of the Judge's death, was whispering to her again. True, however, to my solemn oath, which I have always kept, I asked her nothing, and she always emerged from these periods of meditation into moods of gayety and affection which were more charming than I can describe.

She would romp, mind and body, in all the freshness of youth, with the most entrancing grace of movement and with her natural brilliant play of thought.

"I belong to you!" she would exclaim, retreating before my advance. "Come—take me!"

Then, after I had captured her and she had looked up at me, wrinkling her nose playfully, she would suddenly grow serious, and from her smiling eyes tears of happiness would start, and then, for an hour afterward, she would go singing snatches of song through the house. So that more than once I saw Margaret Murchie stop her household task to listen, shut her old eyes and say, "Thank God for his care of her."

It need not surprise you that I tell you of her, for, as you may understand when I have told you all, I am now facing circumstances which, for some reason, have caused me to fall in love with her with a strange, new, and even deeper desire, and which raise the necessity for me to save her from some unrevealed menace and win her a second time.

The extraordinary fact in the light of this new situation is that our married life has been, until a year ago, as peaceful as could be. Whatever I might have suffered at first from the fact that I had been forbidden to know or ask of the past, these stings soon lost their power to disturb me. I was glad to forget them because I so hated all things which might tend to disturb the well-ordered life with which well-bred families retain their respectable position.

We found our tastes adapted to a common enjoyment of outdoor and intellectual pleasures, and we spent many hours each week, when alone, in reading the books which pleased us and in playing duets, in which I, being an indifferent player of the piano, contrasted my cold technique with the warmth and expression of her performances upon the 'cello. Indeed, we showed ourselves in these duets as in our companionship, for though I loved her, I believe I may have fallen short in those attentions, those little demonstrations and caresses, upon which some women seem to be nourished. As for her, she remained unchanged by marriage or time. By her humor, her tender sympathy, her refreshing, unaffected ways, she won a large and devoted circle of acquaintance, composed of both women and men. If any of the former, however, desired intimacy, they always found a gentle resistance; if the latter, they were made to see that a fortress had been erected on the borderland.

Until a year ago we were very happy, I think. To be sure, as time passed without the coming of any child, Julianna suffered that peculiar grief which, whatever may be its severity, is like no other. The desire for children was not only in her heart and mind: it was also a keen, instinctive yearning. Quietly, and without inflicting upon me any of her distress over unfulfilled hopes of the past, she persisted in the belief that the gift she most desired would not be withheld from her forever. Other than this no cloud seemed to be creeping up our sky, and, indeed, it was only little by little that I realized that some peculiar change had taken place.

I may say to you, I think, that this strange influence came even more than a year ago. I have tried in my own mind to establish a connection between its beginning and an accident which happened at that time.

We had gone for a week-end visit to the Tencorts' farm in the Sweetbriar Hills, and much against my wishes, expressed, however, sleepily, Julianna had gone out at sunrise, chosen a rangy mare, saddled the creature herself, for the grooms were not up, and had ridden off across the wet fields, alone. Breakfast had already been announced when we heard the hoofs of the animal and caught glimpses of the horse's yellow neck and Julianna's plaid jacket, bobbing toward us under the arching trees.

"Your lady is hardly what one might call a gentle rider," said Jack Tencort. "As for me, I'm glad to see the mare in a foam for once, but I would not be pleased to have my own wife—Hello, she is using her right hand."

I, too, could see that Julianna's left arm was hanging by her side, and as she pulled up the panting mare below the porch, I noticed that her lips were white.

"I'm sorry to have forced your animal," she said, "but I was in a hurry to get back. Jerry! Please hurry. Help me off."

"What's the matter?" cried our host behind me.

"To tell the truth," she said. "I have had my arm broken."

"Thrown?" cried Tencort, looking for signs of mud or dust on her costume.

Julianna smiled gamely.

"That is a matter wholly between myself and the mare," she answered.

You know, of course, that in spite of her unconcerned answers the thing was serious. The great trouble, I have always thought, was that no good surgeon was within reaching distance; the country doctor who set the bones failed to discover the presence of some splinters at the elbow, which the injury had thrust up into and displaced some of the nerves and sinew there.

When we had come back home and Nederlinck, the surgeon, had discovered how the healing process had gone on, he told me that for many weeks my wife would have to suffer great pain from the readjustment of the irritated nerves. For two months he did what little he could and then left the rest to time.

Julianna suffered silently. She complained little, but I could see a marked change in her. She became restless. I have seen her pace up and down a room for hours, like a captured animal longing for the jungle, and remain at the dinner-table, after the time had come to go to our library for coffee, with her great round eyes staring before her until some one spoke to her. Her vigor disappeared. The moods which had followed the reading of the post-mortem message from the Judge returned; her little exhibits of affection and, I think, even her innocence of personality disappeared. The spectre, whatever it was, seemed present once more. At times I believed I saw in her beautiful face a look of guilt, of fear—the look of a soul in a panic. She became suspicious of her friends and withdrew from them more and more, at times with such awkward haste that it seemed as if she believed they were about to observe some fact which she must, at any cost, hide. Little by little, too, I believed that I detected signs that she was drawing away from me.

For some reason I have always dated the beginning of this change to that morning when Julianna went off to ride alone. Yet, if I wanted to be sure of bringing back to her face an old trace of her mischievous smile, it was only necessary for me to question her about the cause of her accident.

"I have promised the horse never to tell," she would say, putting her finger to her red lips. And I have never been able to decide whether she was concealing, playfully, some little folly or awkwardness of her own, or, behind her light manner, some more serious experience.

In any case, it was plain that some accursed thing had come between us. I found after some months that I must face this as a fact. We said little to each other from morning till night. When evening had come I did not go home, as I always had, with a little thrill of the old expectation which had never seemed to wear out. Instead I had a subconscious reluctance to enter a relation in which each day sympathy and understanding grew less and less. I began to suffer from a desire to demand from her a complete disclosure of all that had been hidden from me, and this temptation to break my solemn promise grew when, asking her on several occasions as to where she had been at this or that hour, I found that she was evading my questions.

At last it became evident enough that I had not been deceived in my increasing suspicions that something was wrong. One evening she burst into tears as she stood before my chair, and then falling on her knees, caught up my hands in her own and pressed them to her neck, cheeks, and forehead.

"Whatever happens, you will love me?" she cried out desperately. "Say you will! Say you will!"

"You know that," I said.

Perhaps I had answered as badly as I could, for it seemed to cause her the greatest pain.

"I wish you had not said so," she exclaimed, with a wild look in her eyes. "It is your goodness that hurts. Don't you see what comfort it must be to a woman to have her husband cruel to her—beat her—abuse her!"

I drew back from my wife, astounded.

"Stop!" I said, with the first show of stern authority I had ever made since I had known her. "It's time for you who dare to speak like that—to tell—"

"No! No!" she cried. "For God's sake, don't forget your promise. If you do we are lost—I am lost."

She sprang up and away from me, and with her bare arms crossed over her face and her hands over her ears to shut out all sounds, she ran from the room.

This, sir, was seven weeks ago, and for many days following she would sit and look at me constantly, until, feeling her eyes, I would raise my own to find her face drawn as by a weary period of sleeplessness. At these moments it seemed to me that she was trying to make me understand, just as a faithful dog tries at times to communicate his thoughts by the expectancy, the love, or the pleading shining from his eyes. How much would I now give had I been able to do it!

Within the space of a week she brought to me the suggestion and the plan, which I, being driven to desperation by the impending wreck of our happiness, was mad enough to accept without foreseeing the punishment I would have to suffer through giving for the second time a solemn word of honor.

I think on that morning Julianna was more like her old self than she had been for weeks. Her apartments, though separate from my own, are entered from mine by a narrow door. I had prepared for breakfast,—which we do not have served in our rooms according to the degenerate modern custom,—and then had gone to find her, with the thought in my mind that, whatever she suffered or feared, it was my duty to help her as best I might. I had promised myself to be cheerful, yielding, and as entertaining as possible.

She was sitting on the side of her bed when I came in. The whiteness of the linen and the pale blue of her morning gown served to bring out the delicate color of her skin. I was so delighted with this indication of renewed health that I opened my mouth to express my admiration.

She was quicker than I.

"You find me attractive this morning," she said with a sad little smile. "I am glad. I wish that I might be attractive to you forever and ever.—I mean my shoulders, my arms, my hands—free from wrinkles or fat or dryness."

"I'd love you now if you were to assume the shape of a Chinese dragon," I said seriously, "—or the Sheik of Baalbec."

The truth was that I had almost forgotten this latter creature, the automaton. Apparently she had, too, for at first a puzzled look came to her eyes, then she smiled up at me with a bit of her own individual coquetry.

"You are making love this morning?" she said in a gay voice. Yet it seemed to me that in it was a trace of eagerness, shrewdly directed toward a concealed purpose.

"I am going to ask you to go away, Jerry," she went on timidly, but still smiling.

"Go away? When? For what purpose?" I exclaimed.

"Just go away for me—for my sake," she answered, straightening her body, raising her head, and looking squarely at me with some of her old strength. "You can go to live in a hotel. You can explain that you are forced to do so for some business reason. You can say that I have gone away."

She must have seen the flush of my anger, for she raised her hand.

"Don't!" she pleaded. "I know very well how unreasonable I may seem. But if I have earned any gratitude or respect or love from you, just give me what I ask now and give it to me blindly—without question."

Her eyes held my own as she said these words and I knew she had cast her spell over me.

"What do you propose to do for these three weeks?" I asked roughly.

"I shall stay in this house," she answered, spacing her words. "Margaret will stay, too. The rest of the servants I shall send away. But of this I want to be sure—you must not come to find me for three weeks. God only knows what would happen if you did."

"You are insane!" I cried out, with my hand gripping her round wrist. "It's that which has hung over us."

She shook her head.

"Worse," said she.

Then, as if to assure me that she had not lost her reason, she recalled the months which had just gone and described, as I could not, the change in our home, our life, ourselves.

"It is for you!" she broke out finally, as if she were no longer able to be calm. "For you and for our future I am begging you to do what I ask."

"Tell me this," said I, stirred by seeing her tremble so violently. "Has something come to you out of the past?"

"Yes," she said, reaching behind her for the wall. "Ask nothing more. It has come out of the old, old past. For the love of all that is good, promise to do as I say."

"And then?" said I.

"Come back to me. I shall be here—then."

I bowed my head.

"On your word of honor," she commanded.

"On my word of honor," said I, and turned away.

I had scarcely done so, however, before I felt her arms about me, the impact and the clinging of her body. Close to me, plucking at my fingers, my sleeves, my wrist, her body shaking with her sobs, she covered me with caresses like those given at some parting for eternity.

"You—are not—in danger of death!" I exclaimed, holding her away from me at arm's length.

"No, I cannot believe that," she said quietly. "Such as I am, I shall be when you come back."

With these words she pushed me gently from the room; I found myself looking into the broad white panel of a closed door. I stood there a moment, dazed, then going to my chamber, I, with my own hands, packed a large kit bag, preparing to do as she had asked. It was only after I had reflected on my promise that I went again to speak with her. I knocked. There was no answer. I tried the latch. The door was locked.

Without eating my breakfast and with a strange conflict between my trust in my wife and the memory of my experiences since I had known her, I left the house and have not passed its threshold, though it is two weeks to-morrow morning since I left it.

Do you wonder, sir, that I have suffered all the torments which anxiety can devise or imagination, with its swift picture-film, may unroll before one's eyes? I have stifled as best I could these uncertain terrors. By day, when I have plunged into my work at the office, at times I have been able to shut my mind to the everlasting rehearsal around and around, over and over again, of the facts which I have told you to-night; but when night has come, I am the prey of my own thoughts. For six days, in spite of my exaggerated fear of scandal, I have prowled like a ghost before my own house, lurking behind trees, watching my own door like a ten-dollar-a-day detective. Dodging the policeman who would know me, I have kept my eyes for hours on the dim light that sometimes burns in my wife's room, and when I have seen the shadow of some one passing and repassing behind the drawn shade, I have felt my heart in my throat, and have scarcely been able to restrain myself from calling out into the night air, "Julianna! Julianna!"

Finally, I must tell you one thing more. I had believed that perhaps the crisis which had come to her had done so independently of any personality but mine or hers. I was wrong. To-night, unable to remain inactive any longer, and by the accumulation of restraint made desperate, I rung up my house on the telephone. No answer was returned. The feeling that my wife, in danger, was calling upon me, swept over me until, had I been open to such beliefs, I would have felt sure that across the affection and sympathy between us, as across wires, the message came.

I walked hastily from the hotel into the park, taking the path which I had used in the pleasant June days when I had met her at the Monument. You know the kind of night it has been. Therefore when I reached the border of trees opposite my house, I hardly thought it necessary to seek the screen of the shrubbery; the arc lights were throwing the dancing shadows of tree limbs across the pavement, the rush of the wind drowned the noise of footsteps, and the street was deserted, I thought, except for the clouds of whirling dust that passed downtown like so many huge and ghostly pedestrians. I saw that a dim light shone through her blinds and that the house was the picture of peace, suggesting that the walls contained comfort, happiness, and the quiet of a peaceful family. So the fronts of houses lie to us!

At the very moment that this thought came, I saw from my position under the shadow of a spreading oak, which has not yet dropped its leaves, that I was not the only person who was observing the light behind the blinds. A figure was standing not more than a hundred feet away from me, peering out from beyond one of the light poles. It wore a vizored cap, I thought, and its head rolled this way and that on top of its spare, bent, and agile body. Now and then, however, it ceased this grotesque movement to gaze up at the window. One would have said that this creature was less a man than an ape.

I am not a coward. "Here," thought I, "is a tangible factor. My word of honor to Julianna is not broken if I seize this customer, whatever he may be, and make him explain the part he is acting." I stepped forward immediately, but he saw me before I had made two steps. From my bearing and the place where I had concealed myself, he knew at once, I suppose, that I had been watching him, for, turning with a swift motion, he plunged into the shrubs and evergreens behind him. That the thing was as frightened as a rabbit, there can be no doubt; the single little cry it gave forth was not a scream. You would have called it a squeal! In a jiffy I was after him, tearing through the branches among which, with a sinuous twisting of his body, he had just slid; a moment later I reached the open lawn again. The man had vanished.

I knew well enough that he was hiding, probably flattened on the ground, among the evergreens. At another time, on a quiet evening, listening for his movements or even his breathing, might have told me where he lay, but now the wind and the rattle of dead leaves made it necessary for me to use my eyes in my search. Therefore I went back through the bushes, kicking at dark shadows with my foot, my heart thumping with the excitement of the hunt.

As I reached the street again, I looked up toward my house, and there, at the front door, I saw a crack widen and a black figure of a man come out and down the steps. It crossed the street, and when it had gone into the park, I followed it. You know what happened; this second man was you.

And now I ask you, Doctor, man to man—For God's sake, tell me what you know!



BOOK III

THE DOCTOR'S LIMOUSINE

CHAPTER I

A SHADOW ON THE CURTAIN

Such was Jermyn Estabrook's story. I have tried, in repeating it, not only to include all the details given by this desperate young man, but to suggest also the coldness and accuracy of his speech. Why? Because the very manner of narration is indicative of the man's character. He belongs to the dry, dessicated, and abominably respectable class of our society. Pah! I have no patience with them. They live apart, believing themselves rarities; the world is content to let them do it, because theirs is a segregation of stupidity. And Estabrook, though he had fine qualities, belonged to them.

Nothing could have indicated this more clearly than the emphasis he put on his fear of scandal, the smug way he spoke of his word of honor, and the self-conscious blush that came into his handsome face when he mentioned the name of Estabrook. Why, even the menace to his beautiful Julianna was not quite sufficient to cause this egotist to forget his duties toward himself! So if he had not acted with such nobility of spirit during the remainder of our adventures begun that night, I could not sit here now and write that I learned to be very fond of him.

At any rate, Estabrook asked me what I knew and I told him all that I have written—about Virginia, that she seemed to feel the existence of something the other side of her bedroom wall, about MacMechem's notes on the case, the game of life and death I was playing, my conversation with the old servant, and for full measure, I told him where I had learned to place a blow behind a gentleman's ear. It is necessary to deal with men as excited as Estabrook without showing the nervousness that one may feel one's self.

When I had finished, he jumped up from his chair, and, clasping his hands behind his back, in the manner of lawyers, he walked twice across the room.

"Why, don't you see?" he cried. "All that you have told me simply adds mystery to mystery, apprehension to apprehension, fear to fear. And it strikes me that, though my own experience has been bizarre enough, your observations and that of this other doctor who is dead are even more fantastic. What do you hope to accomplish by telling me this gruesome, unnatural state of affairs?"

"I hope to make you act," I said, putting a chair in his path. "We are sensible men. There are, no doubt, explanations for all occurrences. Our limited mental equipment may not find them at once. But the first thing to recognize is the one important fact; neither of us doubts that your wife is in some grave danger. Personally I believe that if you are not mentally deranged, she is! In any case, it's your duty to go to your house. Force an entrance if necessary. It cannot be done too soon!"

Estabrook clenched his hands as he heard me, but after a moment he began to shake his head doggedly.

"Can't you see that it would mean publicity?" he asked.

"Better than losing her," I argued, feeling certain that he would yield.

He did, in fact, cry aloud, but nevertheless he shook his head.

"Impossible," he groaned. "I've given her my solemn promise!"

I suppose I've a reputation for being short of speech, often frank, and sometimes profane. I then allowed myself in my rage to be all three. It was to no purpose. Estabrook would not consent to tearing the cover from his affairs in any way which would cost him the breach of his confounded words of honor.

"You are a madman!" I exclaimed in my vexation. "The death of your wife may be entered against you. What folly!"

"Doctor," he answered quietly, "I want your help and not abuse. Your storming will not accomplish anything. You are the only living soul to whom I have confessed the presence of a skeleton in my married life, and I want you to help me. I have been told repeatedly that you are a man of courage, steadiness of nerve, scientific eminence, and high ability."

I could not disagree with him.

"The next thing, then, is Margaret Murchie, the servant," I said.

"What of her?"

"She knows something," said I. "You have heard how she talked to me, how she tried to conceal her excitement, how she treated me as a spy, how guilty she seemed, and you have indicated that you, as well as I, believe that she knows what is at the bottom of this."

"Yes, yes," cried Estabrook. "I am sure that she knows. But what then—what then? What can we do?"

"My dear fellow," I said, "why 'we'?"

He threw up his hands and sprang out of his chair again.

"I beg your pardon," he answered with a look of chagrin. "I've been under a strain, I suppose, and I forgot that you have nothing at stake."

"Not so fast, Estabrook," I said. "Take another nip of the brandy. I prescribe it for you. And not so fast. I have a good deal at stake."

"What?"

"My case," I said.

He looked at me with admiration.

"Furthermore," I went on, "I feel a certain brotherhood with you, young man. You are the first person with whom I've rolled on the sod for many years. I have punched you in the neck. You are now my patient and my guest. You have confided in me. You have made an unconscious appeal to me for help. Above all, I am one of those old fogies you have mentioned, who secretly mourn the dying-out of romance. Here!—a glass!—to adventure!"

Estabrook smiled sourly, but he drank.

"Thank you," he said. "I appreciate your spirit and, permit me to say, also your attempt to make me treat this terrible affair in a spirit of sport. But old Margaret is the superlative of stubbornness. We cannot expect to go to her to obtain information. I have lived in the house with her for more than six years. Can I say whether she is a saint or a crafty villainess? No. I know no more now than when I shook her in my anger on the evening the Judge died. She has never addressed me of her own will since. She will give up nothing to me. You have tried her already."

"I am less conservative in my ideas," I answered. "Since we are in this field of turbulence and mystery, let us be turbulent and mysterious. All that you say is true. Therefore, we must force the truth from Margaret Murchie."

"You mean to induce her—" he began.

"Stuff!" said I. "The thing I mean is assault and battery. The thing I mean is kidnapping. You may believe in clapping your hand over her mouth and struggling with her, while we take her out. Personally I prefer a cone containing the fumes of a liquid called cataleptol, fortunately well known in my profession, while still a stranger to criminals."

But the careful Estabrook shook his head.

"You are not serious?" said he doubtfully. "Do you plan for me to take part in this?"

"There must be two," I said. "And once we have the lady in this room, I will be willing to guarantee that she will tell all she knows. I cannot ask my chauffeur to go with me, for I trust him about as implicitly as I trust a rattlesnake. Which makes me think—can you run a car?"

Estabrook was weakening. He nodded. I looked at my watch and found that it was after eleven. I drew the curtain and saw that sheets of rain were still being blown slantwise across the foggy radiance of the arc lights. There is a trace of the criminal in me. Perhaps all men feel it at times. Just then, observing the wildness of the storm, I felt the joy of a midnight misdoing, even more than my desire to find the answer to MacMechem's question.

"I shall be glad to know how you propose to gain a second admittance," said Estabrook, when, after tripping over the wet cobblestones and bending our shoulders to the drive of the cold rain, we had groped through the black alley to the dimly lit garage. "I'll also be glad to know why you suppose you can draw a statement from the old woman."

"My dear fellow," said I, "there is the cause of many of your troubles! You are always wanting to see your way to the end. And the way there often must be cut through a trackless waste of events that haven't happened."

"In light of my experience it seems to me that your statement is unreasonable," he muttered peevishly; "but since you are satisfied, I will be, too. If I understand your plan, however, while you sit dry and comfortable within this machine, I am to ride outside, wet to the marrow."

At this remark the sleepy garage attendant rubbed his eyes, filling them with the sting of gasoline, swore, and forgot to submit my new chauffeur to the inspection of his first surprise. He drew back the door and we trundled out into the water-swept thoroughfare.

The rain, which had begun with a thin drive, had now settled into one of those sod-soaking, autumn downpours, commonly called an equinoctial storm. Estabrook was showing the effect of his nervous strain by driving the machine through it with a recklessness of which I disapproved, not only because we had twice skidded like a curling-stone from one side of the asphalt to the other, but also because I did not wish undue attention attracted to our course. The windows in front of me and to the right and left were covered with streaks of water and fogged with the smoke of my cigarettes which, in my pleasurable excitement, I smoked one after the other; therefore everything outside—the spots of light which lengthened into streaks, the shadows, the other vehicles, the glaring fronts of theatres in Federal Circle—formed a ribbon of smutched panorama, the running of which obliterated vertical lines and made all the world horizontal. At each crossing we jumped, landing again to scoot forward to the next, where, through the opening of side streets, came the faint sound of whistles in the harbor; and still, Estabrook,—confound him!—to my cautions bellowed through the speaking-tube, paid no attention.

With shocking suddenness it occurred to me, for the first time, seriously, that I had no assurance that this man who drove me was not a maniac!

I reviewed the meeting with him, the tale he had unfolded, his distraught actions. I am fairly familiar with psychopathic symptoms and my summary of all that I had observed in him indicated clearly enough that he was as sane as any one of us. But for the first time in my life I realized the feeling of uncertainty about a physician's diagnosis which a patient must endure. A doctor delivers his opinion as a matter of self-assertion; the layman receives it as a matter of self-preservation. Riding in that flying car, I found myself in both positions. As a physician I was wholly satisfied with my conclusion; as a man I found myself still in doubt and picturing to myself a wild ten-minute ride, which I had no power to prevent, ending in a chaos of broken glass, twisted metal, clothing, blood, and flaming gasoline.

"MacMechem met violent death the moment he became curious as to the other side of the blue wall," I thought, with a twinge of the superstitious fear which touches prowlers as well as presidents, professors as well as paupers.

We were whirling around a corner then, and through the glass and over Estabrook's broad shoulders, I believed I saw again the treetops of the park.

"At least he knows where he lives," said I to myself as we drew up to the curb.

"Good!" I whispered to him, when I had stepped out into the swash of the rain. "Frankly, I hardly enjoyed it. You drive like a demonstrator."