"I'm a ruin of nerves," he answered, shivering. "I'm afraid I'm a poor assistant for you, anyway. What do you want me to do?"

"Just climb inside there where it is warmer," I said, clapping him on the shoulder. "I'll be back in a minute."

"Back in a minute?" he repeated as if dazed.

"From the Marburys', if you don't mind," I explained.

He leaned back against the cushions, disregarding the fact that with every nervous movement water ran from him as from a squeezed sponge. "Oh, I forgot your patient," said he, with a twitching mouth. "But, for God's sake, don't keep me waiting long!"

I shook my head in answer; then ran, rather than walked, up the Marburys' steps; indeed, that night taught me how active a corpulent old codger can be if the need comes.

Miss Peters evidently had been at the window in her night vigil, watching the storm; she opened the door.

"Well?" said I.

"The tide has turned."

Under the hall light I looked up at her stony, expressionless face. The Sphinx itself was never more noncommittal.

"What do you mean?"

"I supposed you knew," she whispered. "I supposed that was why you came back to-night so late."

I exclaimed in a hoarse and savage whisper. I was furious. This time I had fought with disease not only, as in a common struggle, with carnivorous Death, but as a hardened sinner whose heart has suddenly opened to a child.

"Virginia is dead!" I said, glaring at her.

She never changed the coldness of her tone.

"No," she said. "She is going to get well."

"Confound it!" I growled, under my breath. "How do you know?"

"The blue wall," she answered with a sneer.

"Bah!" said I, starting up the stairs. "We shall see."

As I pushed open the door, I observed that the nurse had procured a red silk shade to screen the single electric lamp on the table. The yellow rays were changed to a pink, reflected on the wall, sending their rosy lights into the depths of that bottomless blue; the breaking of a clear day after a spring rain has no softer mingling of colors. For a moment I looked at the chart, then with new hope turned toward Virginia herself.

Either the new tints diffused by the lamp deceived the eye, or the little girl's pale skin had in fact been warmed by a new response from the springs of life. She was sleeping quietly, her innocent face turned a little toward me and in the faint, illusive smile at her mouth, and in the relaxation of her beautiful hands, I read the confirmation of Miss Peters's prophecy. I, too, believed just then that Virginia would not die, and that, as so rarely happens in this disease, her recovery would be complete.

"It is a wild night," said the bony nurse when I had tiptoed out of the room.

She seemed to be wishing to draw from me an opinion on the extraordinary rally the child had made. That was her way; she always invited discussion of a subject by comments about something wholly irrelevant.

"We shall see," I answered again. "A relapse might be fatal. To-morrow—we shall see."

"It is raining hard," she said as she turned the latch for me.

"Yes," said I, "and the treatment till then must be the same. Who knows—"

"Who knows?" she repeated.

A blast of wind and water and the closing of the door seemed to deny an answer. I found myself on the steps again, looking into the staring eyes of my car, and, with a sharp jump of my thoughts, wondering how we were to accomplish the work we had come to do. I descended, however, and when I had reached the door of my limousine, I saw Estabrook's drawn face pressed close to the glass. It was the sight of him that gave me an idea; it was his first words that, for a moment, drove it from my mind.

"Look! Look!" he said to me. "Look at her window!"

I had merely noticed that a new, bright light shone there; now, in a quick glance over my shoulder, I saw a shadow on the curtain—the shadow of a figure standing with its arms extended above a head, thrown back as if in agony.

"Is it your wife?" I asked in a hoarse whisper.

He took my wrist in the grip of his cold hand. "My God, Doctor, I don't know," he said. "It looks—its motions, its attitudes, its posture!—it looks like the thing I saw outside the Judge's window!"



CHAPTER II

MARGARET

Well, now,—his words made me shudder! I confess it with some reluctance. Of course a doctor comes in contact with enough real horrors. They become ordinary. It is those undefined, doubtful things which run fear through the veins like a drug. Nevertheless I caught myself in time to conceal my nervousness.

"Here, here, Estabrook!" I said in a sharp, businesslike tone. "We didn't come to watch drawn curtains. The question is, did you bring your keys?"

Without asking me questions, he handed them over.

"Now, understand me," I said, for I could see that in truth he was in no condition to offer much assistance. "My advice is for you to take these keys and walk into your own house."

"I can't do that," he said irritably. "I've told you I can't do it—and why I can't."

"Then understand me further," I said when a shriek of wind had gone off down the avenue. "I have debated this question and decided that we must not disturb your wife. She has warned against that, and perhaps it is better to assume she is not insane and take her warning."

"Yes, yes," he cried. "That is right."

"I shall not parley with Margaret Murchie," I went on. "Move a little! I have something I want to reach under the seat. There!—I shall not ask her to come. She will have no choice. It will all be over before she has time to cry out. And you must be ready to help me carry her into this car."

"The law—" he began.

"Oh, I know that," said I. "But it is a choice of doing this, or nothing. Any other course either makes you break your confounded, nonsensical word of honor, or else raises a noise that will bring the reporters around like so many vultures. It is your affair, after all. Shall I stop here?"

Again, as I spoke, I felt the pleasurable thrill of adventure which I had supposed had gone with my youth.

"You want me to wait here till you signal?" he asked.

"Yes."

"As you say!" he agreed. "The old servant knows. She must tell. I can't stand it any longer. She must be made to tell."

I nodded. He indicated the proper key with a touch of his forefinger. Whereupon, crossing the sidewalk again and ascending the Estabrooks' steps with as much unconcern as if they had been my own, I fitted the key softly and turned the lock.

The very instant that I tried to open the heavy door, however, I knew that a watcher who had been observing our movements through the silk curtains was behind it. I felt a resisting pressure. I heard a stifled scream. It was no moment for indecision. With an unbelievable rapidity of thought, I estimated the chances of the unseen person being armed, the hazard of his giving vent to an uproar which would bring the neighborhood about our ears. Then I threw my body against the door with all the force I could muster. It yielded suddenly; with a crash it flew back against the tiled wall. I was precipitated forward and a second later found myself in the ridiculous performance of rolling around on the floor with what felt to me like a fat wash, consigned to a laundry. It was, however, a bundle from which choking imprecations and grunts exploded, and which for a turn or two was enlivened with upheavals of some strength. Well enough to laugh now, but at that moment, you may be sure, I was searching with my free hand for the person's mouth.

I had meant to be gentle: if I clapped my hand over the source of the little cries and protests, when I had found it, with something more than decision, you must blame the circumstances. I had expected to surprise old Margaret from behind and give her such a whiff of cataleptol that she would have suffered no inconvenience. Unfortunately I had not at first known that it was she whom I had encountered, and now there were obvious difficulties in the way of my applying my saturated gauze to her nose.

"Be still!" I commanded, trying to uncork my vial, with a single hand. "Be still. No harm will come to you."

Her reply was a well-placed thrust of her two old knees which nearly sent me through the glass. It placed me in a position, however, where I could, with a push of my foot, close the door and shut us into the vestibule, so that her clamor, which had broken forth again, might be muffled.

Furthermore, I now had my chance to unloose my anaesthetic. I can hear the squeak of that fat cork now; I can recall the pleasure of smelling those dizzy fumes as I thrust the gauze into her face. Time after time she succeeded in thrusting it aside with her clawing hands; time after time I succeeded in jamming it back again against her nose. The scene is not one I recall with pride, but my brief excuse must be that I do not like to have my undertakings fail. The delicacies of the best of us, moreover, depart at critical junctures.

However that may be, the important point is that finally I felt her struggles subside. Her hands no longer acted with intelligence; they moved about wildly in front of her face, as if to push away a tangle of cobwebs. Her head rolled to and fro; the gurglings, sputters, half-uttered cries of rage, ceased.

"Breathe again!" said I, with the habitual phrase of the surgeon administering an anaesthetic. "Breathe away—breathe away—Ah, now!—breathe—breathe—breathe!"

And at last she was still. I threw the gauze into the corner. I got up panting, for I am not built for exercise, and, panting still, I peeped out through the silk curtains to be sure that in our little adventure we had attracted no attention.

The wind-driven rain still swept down the streets under the iridescent glows of the arc lights, my car still stood like a forlorn, forgotten thing in the gutter. In one direction the wet perspective of the avenue appeared as empty as a street scene on a drop curtain. But when I turned my eyes the other way my heart gave quick response. Just beyond the iron fence stood a patrolman.

He had stopped and seemed to be looking directly at the door behind which I stood. I could see his two bare hands on the iron railing. They were very conspicuous against the rubber coat—wet, black, and shiny—which covered his burly figure, and he used them to sway himself softly backward and forward. It seemed to me that he was debating how to act, and I believe that I learned then, peeping through the glass, to what extent guilt and the desire for secrecy will sharpen the imagination.

I say this, because, almost at the moment that I felt sure he had taken a step forward toward me, I saw that not his face but his back was turned toward me, that his hands were behind him and that he had leaned for a moment on the rail, perhaps to look at the physician's green cross on my lights. A second later he ducked his helmet into the driving rain and, walking on, turned into the shadows of the cross-street.

I knew then I had no time to lose. I had been delayed; Margaret Murchie might regain her senses. And yet, when I had signaled to Estabrook, when he, without a word, had come, and when I felt the excitement most keenly, I found myself impressed not with the necessities of the moment, but rather with the extraordinary grotesqueness of the situation.

"Take her about the knees," said I, and then touched his elbow. "Estabrook," I added, "this—mind you—happens in a twentieth-century metropolis."

He did not answer, because the old servant, dashed in her upturned face by a stream of water running from the coping, moved her arms feebly and uttered a groan.

"Quick!" said I. "Drop her and crank up the car. I'll do the rest."

He obeyed.

I dragged the burdensome weight of my victim, if you will so call her, and thrust it into the interior of the vehicle. Estabrook was already on the chauffeur's seat; as quickly as I tell it, the car had begun to pick up speed over the wet and slippery street. We flashed by a light or two and I saw that Margaret Murchie's eyes had lost their stare of unconsciousness.

"Margaret," said I, "you are all right. Be sensible. There is Mr. Estabrook in front."

She shook herself convulsively as if to throw off the remnants of the anaesthetic. Then she caught my sleeve.

"Oh, it's terrible," she cried. "Ye have taken me away from Julie! Bring me back to her, do you hear? You and Mr. Estabrook—What do ye want of me?"

"Quiet!" I said. "We want you to tell all you know."

"You want me to tell it? After all these years? And it's no fault of mine or hers!"

Suddenly she became excited again.

"Take me back!" she screamed. "You don't know what you do! Take me back to my Julie! She may need me sore enough!"

"Have sense," I said close to her ear. "We are going to the bottom of this. You must tell everything—everything from beginning to end."

She was silent for several seconds while we sped out toward the North Side.

"It's awful," she said finally. "And it has gone far enough. It's been more than I can bear. It's time for me to tell! If you, whoever you are, and Mr. Estabrook will hear, you shall have it all—the living truth of it—the bottom of what I know."

"Good!" said I. "And now we'll go to my house."

"No, no," she exclaimed. "There is no need for that. I would not be from the girl while these awful minutes is going by. Who can say what would happen? Oh, no, sir. Take your cab back to our door, and then—sitting on this seat—with my eye on that terrible house—and less need of any of us to worry—I can tell ye all from the first to the last."

In her voice was that sincerity of emotion which invites confidence.

"Very well," I said. "That is agreed."

And then, picking up the speaking-tube, I told the wretched man at the wheel. He swung us around; we turned back, and in five minutes more drew up again, according to my direction, not by the Estabrooks' door, but under the spreading limbs of the oak across from the Marburys' ornate residence.

"Take some of this, my boy," I said as he crawled, wet and trembling, into the interior. "It will be good for you, and for you, Margaret, too!"

"Oh, Mr. Estabrook!" she exclaimed when she had swallowed the stimulant, "I lied to you. I once lied to you very sore, as you shall see."

"Enough—enough!" he cried. "What of her—my wife? She is still alive?"

"Have no fear," replied the old woman. "It's not death that's with us, I'm believing."

The poor fellow wrung his hands.

"But, by the Saints, what I'll tell you now is true," she said, putting her hands first on his knees and then on mine. "Look! The light is shining on my face and you can read it if you like. Sure, I'm praying that you may use the knowledge to save us all."

"Go on," said the young man hoarsely.

And thereupon, in an awkward, jerking manner, which I can only hope to suggest in the repetition, she told a tale of strange mingling of good and evil. This was her story....



BOOK IV

A PUPIL OF THE GREAT WELSTOKE

CHAPTER I

LES TROIS FOLIES

I was born on the Isle of Wight. My father was a seafaring man. He owned his own vessel—a brigantine as sailed from the Thames to British South Africa and sometimes around the Hope to Madagascar.

Where he met my mother I never knew. He was Scotch and she was an Irish beauty, I can tell you. Looking back on it now, I believe she was of rich and proud people and that they had cast her off for her folly in marrying a man that was rough of cheek and speech, for all his ready good heart. She was as delicate and high-strung and timid, as he was brown, big, and fearless as to anything, be it man or typhoon. And yet it was she who could stick to one purpose as if the character of a bulldog was behind the slender, girlish face of her, while he was always making for this and that end, charging at life with head down, like a bull.

I can see the two of them now, walking together arm in arm, when he'd come back out of the sea; I can see them strolling off down along the old hedges of the garden, or sitting beneath the thatched roof of our cottage which had stood the wind sweeping off the Channel for more time than any one at Bolanbywick could remember. She looked like a child beside him, for his shoulders would measure three of the width of hers. It was from him I have my frame that once called to the eyes of men to see the figure that it held, though I say it myself. But from her I got many a trait that fitted me badly, because craftiness and stubbornness and a weakness for sentiment and the like of that, had best be in a body small enough to tame them.

The two of them loved each other completely, each in their way, but it was well that they had no other children. It was well, perhaps, that when I was seventeen I had grown strong and quick as a hound. My mother went with him then for her first voyage since her honeymoon, and it was the last ever seen of her or him, or the only property we owned, which was the vessel and a cargo of cotton ducks and sheetings for speculation, bound to the Gold Coast. Sometimes the sea opens its mouth like that, and the jaws close again.

There was no more education for me! My father's sister was a boarding-house keeper in London. I was staying with her then, and when the lawyer found there was no insurance, life, ship, or cargo, she was for setting me to work the next morning. Poor woman, she had slaved her life against dust in halls and cockroaches and couples who wanted rooms without references and the heart had gone from her, and when she died she left the best of two thousand pound to a clairvoyant and card-reader, who had robbed her week after week for ten years and more.

I took a place as companion to an old lady, going to Odymi in Hungary. It was there one of the doctors, who had seen my two bare forearms, spoke of my strength and told me that I could make good money as a rubber in the baths, and I was glad of the change from the old woman. I was proud and short of tongue and patience with her, and we were always snarling at each other. But time wears those edges off people, I can tell you!

It was there, at the baths, I fell in with the woman who called herself Madame Welstoke. She was an evil woman, and of the worst of such, because she was one who never seemed bad at first, and then, little by little, as she showed herself, you could get used to her deviltry and for each step you could find an apology or excuse, until at last the thing she had done yesterday seemed all right to-day and you were ready for some new invention of hers to-morrow.

Mainly she treated diseases by the laying on of hands, and the best that could be said of her as to that was she preyed on the rich and would take no patients she thought were short of at least fifty pounds to spend for her mumbo-jumbo and gimcracks. She would talk in a very smooth voice to those she got in her web—about the flow of vital energy and the power of positive and negative currents over the valves of the heart and circulation of the blood. She would roll up her eyes and complain of how the treatments, which consisted of laying her fingers on a person's temples and wrists, exhausted her, and at first I thought she really meant it, and when her good, old motherly face was turned away, many was the time I laughed. And finally, when I began to see that most of her patients improved and some were cured, I stopped laughing, for there was the evidence before my eyes and no denying it.

Whether or no she had power to heal, I would have stayed with her. Her influence was like slow rot and the germ of it was deep-seated before you could even see that it was time to resist it. I was acting as her maid in private at first, and before other people, wherever we went,—Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Monte Carlo, and lots of places I have forgotten,—I was supposed to be her daughter who had joined her from New York. And it was all one to me, for I was drawing a fine pay and living very rich and I could see that the name and game of Mrs. Welstoke spelled prosperity.

All this, of course, was before I even saw the Judge, but I was getting my training, and learning how easy money could be made to come through a little fol-de-rol here and a bit of blackmail there, and introducing one class of society to another in the next place. It was easy to salve my conscience, because the old adventuress was curing many a poor sleepless or rheumatic creature who could spend money like dirt to get the result, and besides, she took an interest in me enough to make me wonder why, and she was always keeping her eyes open like a pilot to see that I didn't meet any man who might be after me. To tell the truth, she talked so much of the villainy of males and the horrors of marriage that finally I believed what she said and turned my young face away from all men, just as if good, timid, and bad were run out of the same mould.

We were in Paris when she showed her hand, and, strange enough, she chose to do it one afternoon when we were driving in the Bois with a thousand fine gowns and faces to distract the attention.

"The trouble, Margaret," says she, "is that our reputation runs on ahead of us. Here in Paris it is the same as at Vienna and Rome—we have much more than we can attend to. I can't put my hands on two fools at once, and I am always pained because I am American by birth, as I never yet told you before, and I hate to see five dollars slip by, as we say over there."

"It's too bad," I answers, "for there is no way to help it."

"Indeed!" she says. "I'm not so sure. I haven't made you my daughter for nothing. And I'm thinking of having you treat those who I can't."

"Me!" I cries, very surprised. "You know well enough that I have no power."

At this she leaned back on the cushions and nearly put her broadness on Midget, her toy lap-dog, sitting beside her. But she threw her head back and laughed her own natural laugh, as coarse as a fishmonger's and different from the ripples she could give when anybody was around.

"Power?" says she. "Child alive! I have no power, you simple girl. When I put my fingers on their silly heads, my hands might as well be resting on a sawdust pincushion in the Sahara Desert."

"But the cures?" says I, looking to see if the cocher could overhear us.

That question brought the laugh away from her, and for a minute she looked serious.

"Many a time, when I go to sleep of nights, I think of that myself," she says, patting my hand.

"I actually know no more of the reason for those cures than you. Nevertheless I know surely enough it's not me that cures them. No. I think it's their own wills. A bit of claptrap fools them into exerting their own minds on their bodies, and by the same token the fear of weakness will make the weakness itself. So the world rolls around, my dear."

It was those words of hers I have never forgotten. I've never forgotten, for one reason, because, when I began to play for patients and worked over them with the talk and flap-dash and monkey-shine, and got them to pay their money freely, then half the time they would improve and say they felt the flow of vitality, and some of them went away well and sound as biscuits, when, before they had come to us, they had had doctors and drugs and baths and changes of climate for nothing. I even knew some who would swear that Welstoke's daughter had more power of healing than the great Welstoke herself, and among them, too, was rich and terribly cultured people, who would come with veils in closed carriages and would be afraid their husbands would find out, and then, if they didn't pay the bill rendered, all that was necessary was to threaten suit to have them go into a panic and rush the money to us in a hurry. It is wonderful how easy a person drops into new views of what is fair and right when their surroundings change, and something else is wonderful—the fact that I, who sit here with the two of you now, a broken old housemaid, once had gowns as fashionable as any on the Continent, and that without a penny of inheritance or a single love affair.

"All is well with us," Welstoke used to say, "and all will be well if you have the sense to keep out of a match with some lying-tongued creature who, on his side, will believe nothing you say, and will cast sheeps' eyes at every plump blonde from Benares to Buffalo. Besides which, my dear, there never was one of them that didn't snore. Remember that and you are safe."

Indeed, I thought I was safe, as she called it. I believed that the affectionate natures of my father and of my mother had offset each other in me, for three years went by and never a thought did I give to love of man. And when it came, there was a flit of it like the shadow of a flying bird that comes and goes on the wall and is none the less hard to forget. It is so with all, I'm thinking, high and low, rich and poor; we see these shadows of what might be, and whist! they are gone again, as if to say we'd live again in another world and there is plenty of time in other lives than ours—time for the right head to lean on the shoulder that was meant for it and this hand to touch that!

Be that as it may, the thing happened the winter we were at Venice. Madame Welstoke was in her heyday then, with plenty of money to give dinners for the little crowd that was made up out of dark-brown society—the old men who'd tell of nearly reaching greatness and the like of that, with champagne running from the corners of their eyes and their voices cracking with all the bad-spent years. And there were fat, jeweled women, too, hanging on alimony or adventure, and middle-aged men from this country, who had left New York or Philadelphia for one reason or another of their own, and talked about rates of interest and whistled tunes that were popular in the United States in the seventies, and had a word or two for my shoulders.

"Be careful how you talk too much," old Welstoke would say. "It's a very fair presentment you make with a bit of rouge, and a hairdresser, and keeping your big hands under the table as much as possible. Whatever you do, listen, and be on your guard, if the conversation runs to letters or music. One way to be educated is to be silent!"

Perhaps she laid it on so heavy about my lack of "finish," as she called it, that when my one moment came to speak and say in my plain way a word or two, it gagged me in my throat and would not slide out.

In those days a French Jew, named Vorpin, had a place just off the Grand Canal, called "Trois Folies," and by waiting till mid-evening for dinner, we could find the cafe well-nigh empty. The truth was I went there often alone when a fit of depression was on me, and it was no wonder these fits came. A week of idleness, taken by a person who comes from my class, and should be working eight and ten hours a day, is a misfortune often longed for and seldom recognized when it has come.

Little did I think that evening, of which you will hear, that what happened there was to have its hold on Julianna Colfax, who had not then been thought of as coming into the terrible clutches of that which has followed us like a skulk o' night.

The cafe was long, and longer yet with its gilt mirrors on the white walls and its row of empty gilded chairs, and I found a table in the corner. Perhaps a man and woman or two was there, either too late or too early for the gayeties that went on. I have forgotten. I only know that the sound of lapping water came in through the lattice beside my table and a breeze, too, that cooled my bare neck and would not cool my head, which was full of thoughts of my days in the old garden in the Isle of Wight and my mother's song and the colored crayon of my father, looking very stern, and hanging over the green old china vases on the mantel.

I believe the first thing that made me look up was a crash of glass, of crockery, the exclamation of the waiters, and running feet.

"So here is where they boast of excitement?" roared a thick voice. "And yet a man must make it himself."

The waiters had surrounded him, whoever he was, and I could not see him then.

"Bah!" he cried, beginning to laugh like a stevedore. "I'm an American. Monte Carlo and all that! I'll pay, you frog-catchers! Take that! Ask the proprietor if that will cover the damage!"

A great explosion of squeaky French followed, a word or two of Italian. The waiters parted and this American stepped out. I had expected to see him taller, but his power was in the weight of his shoulders, the easy swing of his drunken progress down the aisle. The devil-may-care was in him—in his handsome, laughing, wild eyes—the look of a child mad with the promise of a world of pleasures.

"Pay?" he roared again. "I pay as I go! Live? I live as I like! Out of the way, dishes! You are here to-day; on the ashheap to-morrow! So with all of us."

With that he pulled off another tablecloth, sending the glassware rolling into splinters.

"Come! Collect!" he said, holding a fistful of notes in the air. "How much? How much? Quickly! I see mirrors down beyond! You lie, you mirrors! I'm walking straight! You lie!"

There was no stopping him. With a heavy crooked cane in his strong hand and the perspiration running from his handsome face, he staggered toward the spot where I was sitting. And yet, though he had raised his stick to strike the chandelier above the next table and had let out a yelp of childish delight before he saw me, I had felt no fear of him.

I can tell you, the effect of the meeting of our eyes was astonishing. I'm thinking there wasn't a muscle in his body that did not pull at him to straighten him up, to take off his hat, to bend him a little backward, as if he had thrust his face among thistles.

As I sat there, looking at those brown eyes of his and listening to his frightened, heavy breathing, I knew well enough I had come to a place where my road of life split and ran in two directions. There are things we know, not by thought or reason or culture, but by the instincts, I'm thinking, that Heaven has put into us along with the rest of the animals. And he knew it, too, perhaps, for he saw me leaning forward on my elbows and a little white and scared of something that can't be put into words at all, and it sobered him, I can tell you.

"What are you doing here?" he said, as though he had known me these six thousand years.

Silly fool that I was, the color came rushing up into my face and I feared to speak. Believe it or not as you like, I could see Welstoke's thin lips saying, "Though your nose and your eyes is very refined, it's your manner of speech as discloses you, my poor dear," and I was silent as a stone, for I thought him a fine gentleman.

"Do you disapprove of me?" says he.

I smiled, I suppose, but my lips only moved. And a look of pain came into his face.

"Somewhere else—some other time," he rather whispered. "God knows how. But you will remember Monty Cranch. It's not soon you'll be forgetting him, girl."

With that he turned and walked out of the place as straight as an arrow, and his words were true—as true as death. And though it was all many years ago, I can tell you, it seems to me now that I can hear the water lapping in the canal outside the lattice and see the wind nodding the flowers on the table that were mocking me—a nosegay one minute, and the next a bouquet for a tomb of something gone and buried. Nor from then to now have I opened these lips to tell living soul of that meeting.

Life kept on as it had been going, with many things sliding in and out, but they have nothing to do with what is hanging over us now. Welstoke and I finally came to America, however, and then luck began to turn. There is a great joke behind the scenes of the little dramas of each of us, and the old lady, who had laid her hand on many a twisted wrist or swollen elbow, began with a joint in her thumb and in six months' time was a hundred shapes with the rheumatism. She was all out of scandals and blackmail then, and lay in bed with her own self coming out, in evil curses for pain and her losses on 'Change, and slow horses, and she who had claptrapped thousands was caught herself by a slick brown man who called himself a Hindoo Yogi and treated her by burning cheap incense in a brass bowl, and a book of prayer that he called the "Word of Harmonious Equilibrium."

"You are all I have now," she would say to me after the cupboard was bare. "Whatever you do, don't get married, my child. These men are all alike. Some of them begin to get knock-kneed as soon as you marry them, and others have great fat middles. You have your choice in these offenses to good taste."

The old fox was wasting breath, though, for I had less notions for men than ever before. I had only to shut my eyes to see one, and though time had slid by fast enough, I could only see him as he was, standing half frightened before me in the Trois Folies. He never seemed to change. I thought he'd always be the same.

Besides, I was loyal to old Welstoke, if I do say it. I tried hard at first to keep our patients coming, but it would not go when the Madame herself was out of the business. I never understood how to hold the confidence of people, and then the only thing left to us was a complexion mask that the old lady had invented. It was a failure, at first, but after I had walked my feet off introducing it, we got a bare living from it, and I thought it would stand between me and starvation when Welstoke had gone.

Finally that day came, too, with the undertaker creeping around in his black, sneaking way, and I found when it was all over that she had secretly incorporated a face-bleach company and sold all she owned to it, complexion mask and all, and lost the whole of what she got on that year's Derby. I've understood from the boarding-house keeper that the last words she said, was, "Now I'm really plucked!" And that was the end of her.



CHAPTER II

THE HOUSE ON THE RIVER

There are times like that, when one's spirit is sick, sore, and lame, as if it was a body, and it goes looking for a place to lie down where nobody will disturb it, and it can feel its dizzy self going into a long sleep. I'll never forget how sick my soul was then—sick of all the false ways and selfishness and all the old scenes, and all big cities and the flow of faces on the streets and the memory of our elegant apartments in Paris, with their pale brocades at the windows and on the furniture, and sick of the sordid surroundings in the cheap New York boarding-house where the rheumatism had finally reached Welstoke's heart, and the paper was peeling off the walls. I had always swallowed the airs and graces of society people very hard, and many was the time I'd wish to drop back among people like my father's family, who didn't mind the smell of cooking and could get a night's sleep by laying a head on a pillow and weren't bothered by frills. So, though it was plain enough that nothing was left for me but to come down in the world, I was not sorry, after all. I could see in the mirror that the easy life I had led at first, and the worry and labor of foot that had come suddenly on top of it, had made me fat of body and yet drawn and old of face. My youth had gone, along with Madame Welstoke, and I had little regret for it or for her.

Business was dreadfully poor then, and for the life of me I could not get a hold on anything in the way of hotel housekeeper, or millinery, or doctor's office-maid. For every position that offered, which was few, there was a mob of women with their smirks and smiles and references in white envelopes that they were trying to keep clean as the days went by. Of course, I had no references at all, and small good would it do for me to tell of my past experience. Besides, as I've often thought since, the way I wore my hair and colored my cheeks, from the habits Welstoke had taught me, was overdone, as all women get to overdoing the thing sooner or later, and more particularly when they think their good looks is threatened by the bleaching and yellowing and drying-up of the wrong side of thirty-five. It's not a thing to help much in applying for work. Anyway, the short of it was that after six weeks I had no job, for all my walks in the heat to save carfare.

You have never felt the panic that comes when it seems as if Fate was chewing away the strands of the rope that holds you to self-preservation; it is a terrible thing and soon takes out of you all fancy notions. It grabbed me by the neck and bent my pride and sent me off praying to find a place through an employment agency. Cooking, washing and ironing was good enough for me the minute I found my last dollar staring up at me from the palm of this right hand. The fall had begun to come on, and, believe it or not, as you like, I dreamed and dreamed and dreamed of walking the streets at night, through the driving snow of winter and down to the wharves and the river, with its cakes of ice and its welcome. And when the first day I had gone to sit in the intelligence room and a lady—she seemed like a blurred picture to me and her questions were far away like the rumble of a train at night—had hired me, I took my alligator bag that was left out of the wreck of old elegance, and I stood up and tried to follow her like a dog till she stopped me.

It was only when I'd met her later and was on the train bound for a little town up the state, that I turned my eyes, kind of cautious, to see who it was had hired me. You could not call her pretty, by any means. She was tall and thin, and there was a prominent bone sticking out at the back of her neck. Her shoulders sloped, too, and looked as if they had been bent forward on purpose to squeeze her lungs together. Her skin was a bit too yellow and her teeth too large and her lips too shapeless. But the steel of people has nothing to do with the scabbard, I'm thinking. Bodies are many a time disguises, and there was only one place where that woman's self peeped through like a flower through the dead coals on an ashheap. It was her eyes.

I never have seen the beat of her eyes for loveliness. No, I never have seen two of them—gray they were—that could toss a God's blessing to you so easy. They gave the lie to her cold lips and made you forget the looks of her, because you knew she'd been made to wear ugliness to test the sweetness of her soul.

I saw 'em when, from all the falseness and worry, all the paint and powder and the mockery of big cities and the jest of money and all the worry and bitterness of the end of my adventures, I felt the relief of being nobody again and going in a home, whose ever it might be, and being where there was trees and hard work and fewer human faces streaming along and looking into yours, only to forget you forever. For the first time since the day I believed I'd never meet Monty Cranch again, my sight was all fogged with tears.

Probably she saw me. And if you'd know the kind of woman she was, I'll tell you that the first I knew, her thin fingers was on my big hands, and I looked up and there were those two eyes. The train was thumping along through the meadows, but I heard her say, "There, there," very soft and she never asked me one word about my past either then or ever after. That was her kind of charity, and may God rest her soul!

Oh, when I look back on that day, I wonder how evil thoughts ever came into my mind and how I could ever wish harm to the white house under the big elms in the centre of the town, where among the business blocks it stood very stubborn, and I wonder how I ever plotted wrong for her or him that was her husband and met us that day at the iron gate.

We saw him reading a paper on the wide porch—a young man then, with a big frame and a habit of looking out very solemn from under his eyebrows and over big tortoise-shell glasses. But he had boyish, joking ways of speech, as you know. He came down the walk between the plats of grass that looked like two peaceful, green rugs spread in the midst of all the noise and bustle of the town, and his long hands pulled up the latch and he smiled at the woman as if he loved her. And she said to me in a very proud and dignified way, "Judge Colfax, my husband."

That was the first time I ever set eyes on him, and in a quarter of a century, beginning as he was then, a judge of county court, and ending, as well you know, I never could see a change in his way of looking at life. Civilization moves here and there and along with it ways and means and customs and fashions and the looks of the buildings and the furniture, but there is a saying of the Judge that comes back to me now. "The way of vice, virtue, passions, and instincts of men is universal and everlasting," he'd say, and as for himself, his eyes were watching it all from too high a place for him to be jumping this way and that, like one of the sheep running with the flock.

It showed on the inside of the house then, as it did the day he died in this city. The look of it was the same then, with most everything that was in it used for comfort and not for show, though in those first days there was no end of ornaments, that was kept for memory's sake—a piece of coral as big as your head brought back by Mrs. Colfax's father, who had been a minister or something to Brazil, and spears from the South Sea Islands, and two big blue biscuitware jars from China that had been a wedding present to the Judge's mother from an importer of tea, who had courted her and been rejected, and documents in frames which I can't remember, except a commission in the army signed by a man named James Madison, and a college degree, and a letter written by Jonathan Edwards to a man dying of consumption. They were hard to keep clean, but I liked those things because they reminded a body of the fact that days had gone by when other people was living with their ambitions and loves, and snoring at night, and pain in their wisdom teeth, and all forgotten now!

Anyway, you'd never know they had wealth, they lived so simply, and Mrs. Colfax had even done much of her own housework. I was hired because a baby was coming, and you can believe it was a happy house in those days, with its peace and the sprinklers spraying water on the lawn in the last hot days of the autumn, and the leaves rustling outside the kitchen window, and the wife singing in her room upstairs, and the Judge looking at her as she sat across the table at breakfast, with his eyes wide open, because, whatever anybody else might think, he believed her the most beautiful looking woman in the world.

I was happy, too, speaking generally. The only trouble was the training that Madame Welstoke had given me. After a body has learned a little of being shrewd like a snake, a cat, or a weasel, and looking on anybody as fair game for blackmail or threats or health cures, it is very hard to shut the cover down on them and never employ those methods any more. I liked the Judge and I might say I loved his wife, but there was still something in me that kept me watching for secrets or skeletons in the closet, and little did I know then how my chance would come.

The baby was born in January,—a daughter—and as beautiful a little creature as you would want to see, with red-brown hair and a pink mouth hard to beat. Of course I've seen parents fond enough of children, but never any so fond of one that their mouths were hushed as they looked at her. The truth was that, as for Mrs. Colfax, she was so bound up in the child that she suffered.

"Margaret," she said to me many a time, "a mother's heart has strange instincts and, I fear, true ones. There is something that tells me that little Julianna will never live."

"Hush, the nonsense!" I answered her, laughing at her white, frightened face. "Trouble enough you'll have with her teething without borrowing more from such things as Death! Look out the window, ma'am, at the snow that covers everything, and be thankful that we are not having a green winter."

"Something will happen," she said. And I believe it was her worry and nervousness that kept her from getting her strength back and wore her thinner and thinner. She would sit in her window that looked down the slope to the river, with Julianna in her lap, and gaze out at the melting snow, or, later, at the first peep of green in the meadows between the two factories up and down the valley, and at those times I would notice how tired and patient her face looked, though it would all spring up into smiles when she heard the voice of the Judge, who had come in the front door.

Then finally there came a night I remember well. It was about the full moon in the early days of April, but a wind had come up with a lot of clouds blowing across the sky. Maybe it was at ten o'clock—just after I had gone to bed, anyway, and had got to sleep—when I heard the screams—terrible, terrible screams. And I thought they were the screams of a woman.

I jumped up, threw open my window, and tried to look through the night toward the river. I could hear something splash once or twice in the water, and then all was still—still as the grave.

You know how a body feels waked out of a sleep like that. Though it was a warm breeze that blew and though I've never been timid, I was shaking like a sheet of paper. It was a minute or two before I could get it out of my mind that some one had been cut from ear to ear. Then I remembered that they had told me that rowdy parties were often boating on the water above the first dam, as the weather grew warmer, and when I listened and heard no sound of any one else in the house stirring, I began to think that my half-sleepy ears had exaggerated the sounds. And then, just as I was about to close the window, a cloud rolled off the moon, and for a second or two there was a great bath of light on the slope, and back of the stable, among the old gnarled apple trees. There were a lot of queer looking shadows among these trees, too, but none so queer as one.

This one shadow was different, for it was not still like the others, but went stopping and starting and scuttling like a crab over the grass—sometimes upright like a man and sometimes on all fours like a beast. At last it stood up and ran from tree to tree in a swaying, moving zigzag. I could see then that it was a man, but for the life of me I could not remember where I'd seen his like. Then another cloud slid over the moon and the night was as dark as velvet again.

You may be sure I passed a restless night. Perhaps the Judge saw it, for when he came in from his regular early morning walk the next day, looking very grave and solemn and troubled, he stared at me a minute before he spoke.

"Margaret," said he, "you look overworked."

"Oh, no, sir," I said, half ashamed to tell of my fright.

"I'm glad to hear you say so," he answered. "I was about to ask you whether you could add to your duties by taking full charge of Julianna."

"The baby!" said I. "Has anything happened to Mrs. Colfax?"

"No," he said, a bit excited, "but I'm going to send her away to-day. I trust it will be soon enough. The doctor has been advising it this long time. Mrs. Colfax is on the edge of nervous prostration, and the baby should be taken from her now and put in your care while she is gone."

I think I must have shrunk back from him. I remembered the screams. I could hear them again in my ears—terrible, terrible screams—at the river.

"While she is gone!" I whispered.

"Yes," said he. "What ails you? You have heard the plan before."

"But the haste, sir," I said. "What is this dreadful hurry about?"

"Not so loud," said he. "You will hear the news soon enough. I may as well tell you. But it must be kept from her at any cost until she is away. A dreadful thing has happened—happened in the night,—not two hundred yards from this house. A woman has been murdered."

"A woman!" I said. "Who?"

"Her name was Mary Chalmers," he said. "She was an actress. She and her husband and their baby had come up from New York. She was found this daybreak at the dam by one of the factory watchmen. There was an overturned boat. The baby had been left asleep in the boarding-house where they were staying, and the husband had been heard to say that he would take her rowing on the river. He had been drinking. He was caught trying to catch the early morning train, and was still so befuddled that he could only say over and over again that he had no memory of where he had been. He says he is not guilty and has sent for a lawyer. The coroner has gone to the dam. That is the story and my wife must be prevented from suspecting any of it. The man will probably be held. It looks badly for him, and the case, if tried, will come before me. My wife must be kept away until it is all over; she must not suffer the morbid worry."

"Did any one hear screams on the river last night?" I asked, biting my finger.

"Several heard them," he said, nodding.

I felt a great relief from that answer, for I had a dread of being called as a witness and then and there I made up my mind that, come what might, I would tell nothing. "What one sees to-morrow, and what one didn't see yesterday, makes the road easy," Madame Welstoke had been used to say, and I recalled her words and thought highly of their wisdom. And yet I have many the time, wondered whether, if I had told of the creature I had seen, scuttling like a crab over the grass in the orchard, I might not have prevented the grisly prank that Fate has played.

That afternoon my mistress, in spite of her gentle protests, was taken to the train by the Judge and Doctor Turpin, who I've always remembered as an old fool, trying to wipe the prickly heat off his forehead with a red-bordered silk handkerchief. One of the neighbors, clinking with jet beads till she sounded like a pitcher of ice water coming down the hall, went on the journey to the mountain sanitarium with Mrs. Colfax, as a sort of companion, and when all the fuss of the departure and the slam of the old cab doors and the neighing of the livery-stable hearse horses was over, I was left alone with the baby Julianna and the Judge.

The child was laying on its fat little naked back, kicking its feet at me, when the father came upstairs.

"Please, sir," said I, "what is the news?"

"The inquest says drowning or blows on the head administered by a party or parties unknown," he answered gravely. "John Chalmers, the husband, acts like a heeled snake—violent and sinuous by turns. His lawyer has waived all preliminary proceedings and, as luck will have it, we have a clear docket to go to trial with a jury."

By afternoon the town was filled with reporters who had come up on the midday train. From the back windows you could see them walking along the banks of the river and talking with a man in a red shirt. And later I learned he was the one who had gone out in a rowboat and found the poor woman's silly hat, that, with its wet yellow roses and lavender veil, had floated around amongst a clump of rushes. With night the city papers came, full of accounts of the actress and how she had played in melodramas, until finally she had played her farewell in a tragedy of real life. One said her husband was going to prove an alibi; another said he had no memory whatever of where he had been or what he had done that evening; and still another paper said the woman had been seen to quarrel with him and join a mysterious stranger, who was described as being a hunchback of terrible ugliness. All three of those I saw said the mystery might never be solved, but that new developments were expected every minute by both the state police and the chief of the local department.

"Margaret," said the Judge that evening at supper, as I was waiting on him, "you must not be talking of this murder with any one. Remember that you are employed in my home. Furthermore, I have old-fashioned notions, and so, from now on, I have stopped the 'Morning Chronicle' from coming to the house and I don't want any newspapers brought in until the trial is over."

"And when will that be?" I asked.

"Soon, I hope," he answered. "The district attorney, I understand, has conferred with the police again this afternoon, and believes he has enough evidence to hang Chalmers and that no more can be gathered. For some reason the defense is equally satisfied. Do you understand now?"

"Yes, sir," I said. "There won't be much delay."

"Not much delay," he repeated over after me, and his voice shook as I never heard it shake before that minute.

"The beast!" I said.

"Hush," said he. "He must be found guilty first. But if he is—"

He stopped there, but I saw the light in his eyes and his long, tight-clenched fingers turning white under the pressure, and I knew, if he passed sentence on John Chalmers, what it would be.

That was the last word I ever heard from him before the trial was over, and I had to be running over to the neighbors for all the news I got. A reporter came to ask me one day if I had seen a strange man loafing in the meadows the evening the thing happened. He was a red-haired, freckled young man who kept pushing his hat, first to one side of his head and then the other, and talking first to one side and then the other of a pencil held in his teeth, so I could hardly hear a word he said. But he told me that, following the case from the beginning, he had been the one who had discovered that two weeks before the murder the man had insured his wife's life in his own favor and that before he had met and married her he had had a different name,—Mortimer Cross,—and been a runner for a hotel in Bermuda, and lost the place because, in a fit of anger, he had tried to knife a porter.

"The police haven't half covered this case," he said, with his green eyes snapping. "I've got more evidence for my paper than they can get for the State's case. I haven't slept four hours in forty-eight."

"Young man," said I, "how much do you get a week?"

He grinned.

"Twenty dollars," he said.

"You work like that for twenty dollars?" I asked.

"For twenty dollars!" said he. "What's the twenty dollars?"

"Well, then—" said I.

"It's the game!" he said. "But you don't understand."

"Don't I, though!" said I. And for days the old desire for adventure, for all the crooked ways, came back to me and made me as restless as a volcanic island, as Madame Welstoke used to say.

It was then I used to begin to hate the baby at times. I could have loved one of my own, and the feeling that this one belonged to some one else, and that I probably never would have the touch of hands that belonged to me, haunted me like a gray worm crawling through my head. Many a time as I would be dipping little Julianna into her bath, these thoughts would come to my wicked mind, and, drying her, I'd dust the powder over the pink body till the room looked like a flour-mill. I wished the trial would hurry to come and go, so Mrs. Colfax, who was writing such pathetic, patient letters about her baby, could return, and I laid many a curse on the fat doctor for making so much fuss about her nervous condition and for sending her away.

I could not go to the court and I had to pick up what I could of the trial, as it went on, from gossip and reading of papers in my own room after I had gone to bed. Sometimes I'd wheel Julianna down the street to the court-house, and then I'd see men with fingers raised as if they were all barristers, or imitating barristers, standing on the court-house steps and whispering and talking and laughing, and the sheriff, with a blue coat and mixed trousers and gray side whiskers, sitting on a campstool under the big elm tree, like a man at an old soldiers' home, and factory-girl witnesses, giggling as they went up and disappeared into the dark corridors, and the drone of voices coming out of the open windows, and perhaps the jury walking in pairs and acting very important, with a deputy sheriff taking them over to the Lenox Cafe for their lunch. The murder mystery had brought up a lot of curious people from the city, and I remember one—a woman with folds of skin under her chin and plenty of diamond rings—who wiped her eyes, pretending there were tears in them.

"Where is the court-house?" she said to me, just as if she could not see it. "I was the woman's most intimate friend once."

That was the way with most everybody. They did not like the thought of the poor dead woman or the horror of it, but only the thought of being important and knowing something about it that the next one did not know. One girl in the town—a daughter of the biggest grocer and quite a belle—could imitate the screams she had heard and did it over and over, because she was begged by her girl friends, and so she was something of a heroine and thought for still another reason to be a good person to know.

The Judge was made of different stuff, I can tell you. We did not have many criminal trials in our family, so to speak, and I think it must have eaten well into his heart, for he was very silent and grave at meals and never laughed, except when he came up to play with the baby and ride the little thing, with its lolling head and big eyes, on his knee.

It took over a week to finish the trial after they had begun it. They had wanted to trace John Chalmers's history, but he would tell nothing of it himself, and his past was a mystery, and there was a feeling among those who discussed the case that this would be against him. In fact, every one said he was surely guilty. He had misused his wife's life; he was a drunkard and subject to fits of violence; he had asked his wife to go rowing on the river at a season when it was still cold; she had screamed; he was a good swimmer; there were signs of blows on her head; he had rescued himself, but not her, and he had tried to run away from the town without reporting her death. To be sure, he had been able to show that he had been drinking, and evidence was brought to prove that he had lost consciousness after getting out of the water, and that when he had awakened he had asked a sleepy milkman where the police station was and had been directed to the depot by mistake. According to his own story, the boat had tipped over when the moon was behind a cloud and he had lost all trace of his wife after her first struggle in the water. But people laughed at this story, and as for myself, I wondered who was the creature I had seen in the orchard, mixed up with the queer shadows and running from tree to tree like a frightened ape. Little knowing what was to happen, I wondered whether I should ever see John Chalmers, the accused man, before the law had made way with him.

I never doubted that the law would hesitate, till the day the Judge came home to dinner at six in the evening and told me that the case had been in the jury's hands for three hours already. How well I remember the long rays of the sun slanting over the slope, the songs of the wild birds that had sneaked into the trees along the green back yards of our dusty street, and how it came to me then that the world was too beautiful to be befouled by the hates of little men, whose appetites were no more important than the appetites of the caterpillars eating the green foliage. But I could see the hates of men reflected in the Judge's face.

"Surely they would not let him go, sir?" said I.

He only shook his head, and later he went out without once asking for the baby, and I knew when I heard the gate slam that things had not gone well at the court-house.

At eight o'clock that night I was on the porch when a man came tearing up to the fence, almost fell off a bicycle, vaulted the rail, and came running over the grass.

"Got a telephone?" he said.

"Yes," said I, with the answer frightened out of me.

"Gimme a match," said he. "I've gotter have a cigarette. Hold on, I got one."

He lit it. In the flare I saw it was the red-haired, freckled reporter and his green eyes was all alive again.

Before I could stop him, he had pushed his way ahead of me into the Judge's study and was at the instrument.

"A line!" he gasped. "I want New York."

He was snapping at his cigarette like a wild thing, and, along with his perspiration, ashes and sparks were dropping on the rug.

"Excuse me," he said. "I lost my prey!"

"What!" said I.

"Acquittal," said he. "The Judge was too damned conscientious in his charge to the jury.—Come on, there, New York! Confound you, come on! I've got to relay a message through to my paper."

"Acquittal?" I asked, trembling like a horse.

"Acquittal," he roared into the instrument. "This is Roddy. Five hours out. Interview with Dugan, juryman, local plumber. Says strict charge of judge did it. Prisoner gone down to River Flats with counsel. Drinking with Fred Magurk in kitchen barroom. Refuses to talk. Rest of story already gone by telegraph."

He turned around then and grinned as if it hurt him—as if he was trying to hide some pain. I had lit the lamp and you cannot begin to know how funny his white face looked under his bright red hair.

"Can I get a drink of water?" he said, choking, and then over he went face foremost into the morris chair.

I ran into the kitchen and what with the water splashing in the sink, I did not hear the Judge come in, and the first I knew about his being there was when I went back into the library. There he stood, with his tortoise-shell glasses in his long fingers, looking down at Mr. Roddy, sitting weak and blinking in his chair.

"Sorry, Judge, to faint away like a queen dowager in your library," said the reporter, with his everlasting American good nature. "But I came in to use the first telephone I could find. I was a little tired. My name's Roddy."

"Mr. Roddy," said Judge Colfax, holding out his hand, "I know of you very well and of your work on this case."

"Too bad!" said Roddy,—"the outcome?"

"I express no opinion," the Judge answered in a weary voice.

"The prisoner lost no time in finding liquor again," said the other. "He went to a bar before he went to his baby."

This reached the Judge. His eyes snapped. There was a low growling in his throat.

"Margaret," said he to me, "bring this gentleman some brandy. You will rest here a while, Mr. Roddy. I suppose you will not leave until the eleven-thirty train."

"Thank you. I'm played out," said the reporter. "I thank you."

And so it was that, with many a queer thought in my head, I sat in the kitchen rocker, listening to the mumble of their voices and waiting up to see if they should want me for anything. And so it was, too, that at last I found myself nodding with sleep, and started to go upstairs to bed.

Call me superstitious if you like, but I know well enough that some of us humans can feel the whisper of evil and terror before it reaches us. It spoke to me on those dark back stairs with the moonlight shining on the wall at the top, and I was brought up sharp and wide awake, when the air rang with it as if it was a bell.

"You're half asleep, you old fool," I said, feeling the sweat start out on my forehead, and I repeated it to myself when I was in my room and turning down the bedclothes.



CHAPTER III

A VISITOR AT NIGHT

A nice breeze was blowing in from the meadows, cooling the hot night, and finally, when I was laughing at my nervousness, I went to the window and leaned on the sill. It was a very peaceful scene, I can tell you, with that long stretch of grass and daisies and the water, and the light, carried through the factory yard up the river, bobbing along as the watchman passed one window after another. All but the apple trees! They seemed as horrible as ever, and a dozen times I thought I saw men without heads, or with long arms like apes, creeping and skulking from one shadow to another. At last I felt my eyes sore with staring at them, and I turned away.

Just then I heard the knocking at the back door. It was soft and careful at first and then a little louder.

"Some one from up the street to ask me questions," said I, feeling my way down the stairs, but then I caught the sound of something that I thought was the mewing of a cat. If I had had any sense I would have called to the Judge before I slid the bolt and opened the door.

The thing I saw was a little bundle of white clothing. At first it looked so white it seemed to give off a light and I thought it was hanging in the air. Then I saw two hands were holding it, and that it was a child.

"I want to see the Judge," said a thick, evil voice. "I've got a joke for him—the best joke he ever had played on him."

"And who are you?" I asked.

"Oh, he'll see me all well enough," said the man, with a heave of his shoulders. "I'm John Chalmers!"

I could not speak. I stepped back and he came in. He must have heard the voices in the study. But I can hardly say what happened. I only know that I found myself standing behind him and that I saw him put the baby into a chair and heard him cough.

The two men—the Judge and Mr. Roddy—looked up, and I never saw two such faces.

"Stare!" said the terrible creature. "Well you may! Go ahead and stare, for all the good it will do you. I know you both. Both of you wanted me hung, didn't you? You're clever men—you two. But I'm cleverer than you. The joke is on you."

"You came in?" asked the Judge in a whisper, as if he didn't believe his eyes.

"Yes, and I'd have come in the front door if the people, with their butterplate eyes, weren't watching me wherever I go. Oh, don't think I'm crazy with drink. No! I'm clever."

The Judge and Mr. Roddy had stood up and the Judge could not seem to find a word to say, but Mr. Roddy clenched his freckled fists.

"What yer want?" he said.

"I came to tell you," said Chalmers, "that the joke is on you. I didn't expect the pleasure of seeing you, Roddy, my fine penny-a-liner. But you're in this, too. The joke is on you. I've been acquitted."

"What of it?" the Judge said.

"I can't be tried twice for the same crime, can I? Didn't my lawyer tell me? I guess I know my rights. Ho, ho, the joke is on you, Judge. I saw your eyes looking at me for a week. I knew you would like to see me hung and Roddy there,—he nearly got me. But I'm safe now—safe as you are."

The reporter laughed a little—a strange laugh.

"You killed her, after all?" he asked.

"Yes," answered the other in a husky and cheerful voice. "I did. That's where the joke is on you. I did the trick! Me! And what have you two got to say? Who takes the bacon—me or you?"

"You don't know what you say," the Judge cried.

"Yes, I do," roared the man. "I tell you I did the trick and got tried once, and I'm free forever. There isn't anybody can touch me. I tell you the joke is on you, because I did it."

I could see Mr. Roddy's green eyes grow narrow then. He turned to the Judge.

"Is that so?" he asked. "He can't be arrested again?"

The Judge shook his head. I can see this minute how his face looked.

"Well," said Mr. Roddy, with a long sigh, "I'm beat! I've seen a lot of criminals in my day. Some were very clever. The joke is on me, Chalmers, for I'm obliged to say that you are the cleverest, slickest person I've ever seen, and you beat me! I've a lot of respect for you, Chalmers. Here's my fist—shake!"

The other walked to meet him and they clasped hands in the middle of the room. It was only for a second; for as quick as a flash, Mr. Roddy seemed to stiffen every muscle in his body. He pulled the other man toward him with one arm and shot out his other fist. It made a dull sound like a blow struck on a pan of dough. And the wretched murderer slumped down onto the floor like a sack of bran, rolled over on his back, and was still.

"There!" said Mr. Roddy, with his cheerful smile.

The Judge had jumped forward, too, with a shout.

"Just a minute, Judge," said the reporter. "Let me explain. You remember that I found out that two years ago our clever friend was at Bridgeport. That summer a girl was found in the park there—murdered. I was on the case. They never found out who did it. Have we or have we not just heard the confession of the man who killed her?"

"You mean to testify that this brute confessed to that other murder?" asked the Judge, choking out the words. "You mean to hang this man for a crime he never committed?"

"Why not?" asked Mr. Roddy. "It's between us and it can be done. It's justice, isn't it?"

"My God!" said the Judge. He began to bite his knuckles as if he was tempted sorely enough.

What made me step over to look at the unconscious man's face? I do not know, unless it was the design of Fate. White it was—white and terrible and stamped with evil and dissipation and fearful dreams. But there was a smile on it as if the blow had been a caress, and that smile was still the smile of a child who sees before it all the endless pleasures of self-indulgence.

I felt the years slide back, I saw the mask of evil and folly torn away. I was sitting again in a beautiful gown in the Trois Folies in Venice, the wind was blowing the flowers on my table, the water in the canal sounded through the lattice, a man was tearing tablecloths from their places, dishes crashed, and then I saw the fellow's smile fly and his face turn sober, and I heard his voice say, "What are you doing here?" as if he had known me for centuries. Because I knew then, in one look, that John Chalmers and Monty Cranch were one. I had met him for the second time—a wreck of a man—a murderer. But the mystery of a woman's heart—!

"Well," I heard Mr. Roddy say, "are we going to hang him?"

"No," I cried, like a wild thing. "No, Judge. No! No! No!"

"And why not?" he asked, glaring at me.

"It's against your oath, sir," I said, like one inspired. "And it's against honor to hang a creature with lies."

The Judge thought a long time, struggling with himself, until his face was all drawn, but at last he touched the red-haired reporter on the elbow.

"She is right," said he. "The incident is closed."

Something in his low voice was so ringing that for a moment none of us spoke, and I could hear the drawn curtains at the window going flap-flap-flap in the breeze.

At last the reporter looked at his watch. "Well, Judge," he said, with his freckled smile, "I'm sorry you can't see it my way."

"You want to catch your train," the master replied quietly. "It's all right. I have a revolver here in the drawer."

"Probably I'm the one he'll want to see, anyway," Mr. Roddy said in his cool, joking way. "Quite a little drama? Good-night, sir."

"Good-night," said the Judge, without taking his eyes from the man on the floor. "Good-night, Mr. Roddy."

I can remember how the door closed and how we heard the reporter's footsteps go down the walk. Then came the click of the gate and after a minute the toot of the train coming from far away and then the silence of the night. Then out of the silence came the sound of Monty Cranch's breathing, and then the curtains flapped again. But still the Judge stood over the other man, thinking and thinking.

Finally I could not stand it any longer; I had to say something. Anything would do. I pointed to the baby, sound asleep as a little kitten in the chair.

"Have you seen her?" I asked.

"What!" he answered. "How did she come there? You brought her down?"

"That isn't Julianna," said I. "It's his!"

"His baby!" the Judge cried. "That man's baby!"

I nodded without speaking, for then, just as if Monty had heard his name spoken, he rolled over onto his elbow and sat up. First he looked at the Judge and then I saw that his eyes were turning toward me. I felt my spine alive with a thousand needle pricks.

"Will he know me?" thought I.

He looked at me with the same surprised look—the same old look I thought, but he only rubbed his neck with one hand and crept up and sat in the big chair, and tried to look up into the Judge's face. He tried to meet the eyes of the master. They were fixed on him. He could not seem to meet the gaze. And there were the two men—one a wreck and a murderer, the other made out of the finest steel. One bowed his head with its mat of hair, the other looked down on him, pouring something on him out of his soul.

"Well, I'm sober now," said Cranch, after a long time. "I know what you're thinking. I know it all. I know it all."

"You are not human," whispered the Judge.

Can you say that certain words call up magic? I do not know. But those words worked a miracle. In a second, like something bursting out of its shell, the Monty Cranch I had treasured in my heart tossed off the murderer, the drunkard, the worthless wretch who had been throttling him and holding him locked up somewhere in that worn and tired body, and came up to the surface like a drowning man struggling for life.

"Human?" he said in a clearing voice. "Human? Am I human? My God! that is the curse of all of us—we're human. To be human is to be a man. To be human is to be born. To be human is to have the blood and bone and brain that you didn't make or choose. To be human is to be the son of another without choice. To be human is to be the yesterday of your blood and marked with a hundred yesterdays of others' evil."

He jumped up. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot.

"Am I responsible for what I am?" he roared. "Are any of us?"

The Judge looked frightened, I thought.

"Blood is blood," cried Monty, with the veins standing out on his forehead. "That's why I brought the baby here. I wanted to kill her. Blood is blood. There's mine in that chair—and it is me, and I am my father and he was his father, and there's no escape, do you hear? I wanted to kill her because I loved her, loved her, loved her!"

He fell back in the chair and covered his face with his hand and wept like a child.

I looked at the Judge and I could have believed he was a bronze statue. He never moved an eyelash. I could not see him breathe. He seemed a metal figure and he frightened me and the child frightened me, because it slept through it all so calm, so innocent—a little quiet thing.

"Well, Chalmers," said the Judge at last, "what do you mean to do? You're going away. Are you going to leave your daughter here?"

Monty's head was bowed over so his face did not show, but I saw him shiver just as if the Judge's words had blown across him with a draft as cold as ice.

"I'm going to Idaho," he said. "I'm going away to-night. I've got to leave the baby. You know that. Put it in an institution and don't let the people know who its father was. Some day my blood will speak to it, Judge, but half my trouble was knowing what I was."

"By inheritance," said the Judge.

"By inheritance," said Monty.

"You love this little daughter?" the Judge whispered.

Monty just shivered again and bowed his head. It was hard to believe he was a murderer. Everything seemed like a dream, with Monty's chest heaving and falling like the pulse of a body's own heart.

"You never want her to know of you—anything about you?" asked the Judge.

"No," choked Monty. "Never!"

"Every man has good in him," said the Judge slowly. "You had better go—now!"

Without a word, then, Monty got up and went. He did not rush off like the reporter. He stopped and touched the baby's dirty little dress with the tips of his fingers. And then he went, and the front door closed slowly and creaked, and the screen door closed slowly and creaked, and his shoes came down slowly on the walk and creaked, and the iron gate-latch creaked. I went to the window and looked out one side of the flapping curtain, and I saw Monty Cranch move along the fence and raise his arms and stop and move again. In the moonlight, with its queer shadows, he still looked like half man and half ape, scuttling away to some place where everything is lost in nothing.

"We can't do anything more to-night," said the Judge, touching my shoulder. "Take the child upstairs."

"Yes, sir," said I.

"Stop!" he said huskily. "Let me look at her. What is in that body? What is in that soul? What is it marked with? What a mystery!"

"It is, indeed," I answered.

"They look so much alike when they come into the world," he said, talking to himself. "So much alike! I thought it was Julianna."

"And yet—" I said.

He wiped his tortoise-shell glasses as he looked at me and nodded.

"I shall not go to bed now," said he. "I shall stay down here. Give the child clean clothing. And then to-morrow—"

I felt the warmth of the little body in the curve of my arm and whether for its own sake or its father's, I do not know, but my heart was big for it. In spite of my feeling and the water in my eyes, I shut my teeth.

"To-morrow," I said.

How little we knew.

How little I knew, for after I had washed the child, laid it in the big vacant bed, and blown out the candle, I remember I stood there in the dark beside little Julianna's crib with my thoughts not on the child at all. It was the ghost of Monty Cranch that walked this way and that in front of me, sometimes looking into my eyes and saying, "What are you doing here?" and other times running up through the meadow away from his crime and again standing before a great shining Person and saying, "What I am, I was born; what I am, I must be."

I went downstairs once that night and peeked in through the curtains. The Judge was at his desk with his hands folded in his lap and his eyes looking out from under his heavy eyebrows, as if he had the puzzle of the world in front of him and was almost afraid. I thought of how tired he must be and of what a day it had been for all of us.

At last a board squeaked on the stairs, reminding me of the late hour and my aching body and burning eyes. So I went up to bed and tossed about until I fell asleep.

I know I could not have slept very soundly. Little matters stick in the memory if they are connected with such affairs. And so I remember half waking to hear the slam of a blind and the howl of a wind that had sprung up. Things were rattling everywhere with every gust of it—the curtains, the papers on my bureau, the leaves on the trees outside, and I pulled the sheet over my head and thought of how my father and mother had gone down at sea, and fell into dreams of oceans of melted lead hissing and steaming and red.

I think it was the shout of some man that woke me, but that is neither here nor there. The house was afire! Yellow, dancing light and smoke poured under the door like something turned out of a pail. With every puff of the wind the trees in the orchard were all lit up and the flames yelled as if they were a thousand men far away and shouting together. Between the gusts you could hear the gentle snap and crackle and the splitting of sap in wood and a body's own coughing when it tried to breathe in the solid mass of smoke. There were shouts of people outside, too, and the squeaking and scampering of rats through the walls. Out of my window I could see one great cloud of red sparks. They had burst out after a heat explosion and I heard the rattle and tinkle of a broken window above the roar of the fire.

Of this terrible element I always had an unreasoning terror. Many a sleepless night I spent when I was with Madame Welstoke, and all because our rooms might happen to be high up in the hotel where we had put up. You can believe that I forgot all and everything when I opened my door and found that the little flames were already licking the wall on the front stairs and smoke was rolling in great biscuit-shaped clouds through the leaping pink light. I could not have told where I was, whether in our house or city or another. And I only knew that I could hear the voice of my old mistress saying, "Remember, if we do have trouble, to cover your face with a wet towel and keep close to the floor." It was senseless advice, because the fire, that must have started in the Judge's study, kept blowing out into the hall through the doorway, and then disappearing again like a waving silk flag. I opened my mouth and screamed until my lungs were as flat as empty sacks.

I might have known that the Judge, if he were still in the library, was not alive, and I might have noticed, as I went through his sleeping-room to climb out on the roof of the front porch, that he had not been to bed at all. But it was all a blank to me. I did not remember that there was a Judge. Fire and its licking tongue was after me and I threw myself off the hot tin roof and landed among the hydrangea bushes below. In a second more I felt the cool grass of the lawn under my running feet, and the first time that I felt my reasoning power come to me I found myself wondering how I had stopped to button a skirt and throw a shawl around my shoulders.

There were half a dozen men. Where they had come from I do not know. They were rushing here and there across the lawn and vaulting the fence. They did not seem to notice me at all. I heard one of them shout, "The fire alarm won't work! You can't save the house!" Everything seemed confused. Other people were coming down the street, running and shouting, sparks burst out somewhere and whirled around and around in a cloud, as if they were going up into the black sky on a spiral staircase. The walls of the grocery and the Fidelity Building and the Danforths' residence across the street were all lit up with the red light, and a dash of flames, coming out our library window, shriveled up a shrub that grew there as if it was made of dry tissue paper.

"How did it start?" yelled a man, shaking me.

I only opened my mouth and looked at him. He was the grocer. I had ordered things from him every morning.

"Well, who was in the house?" he said.

"The Judge," I said.

"The Judge is in the house!" he began to roar. "The Judge is in the house!"

It sounded exactly like the telephone when it says, "The line is busy, please ring off," and it seemed to make the people run together in little clusters and point and move across the lawn to where the sparks were showering down, and then back, like a dog that wants to get a chop-bone out of a hot grate.

Suddenly every one seemed to turn toward me, and in a minute all those faces, pink and shiny, were around me.

"She got out!" they screamed and shouted. "Where's the Judge? Any one else?"

"The Judge and the baby!" I cried and sat down on the grass.

"No!" shouted the depot master. "The Judge is all right. I just met him walking over the bridge after the freight had gone through. It wasn't twenty minutes ago. But you can't save a thing—not a stick of furniture. The whole thing is gone from front to back on the ground floor already!"

"Here's the Judge now! That's him running with the straw hat in his hand," a woman shrieked, and ran out toward him with her hair flying behind. I could see his tall figure, with its long legs, come hurdling across the street. I could see his white face with the jaw square and the lips pressed tight together.

"You!" he said, bending down. "Yes! Where's Julianna? Where's my baby?"

My head seemed to twist around like the clouds of pink smoke and the whirl of hot air that tossed the hanging boughs of the trees. The crackle and roar of the fire seemed to be going on in my skull. But I managed to throw my head back and my hands out to show they were empty.

"God!" he cried.

The world went all black for me then, but I heard voices.

"Stop, Judge! Don't go! You'd never get out."

"Let go of me!"

"He's going into a furnace! Somebody stop him!"

"Look! Look! You'll never see him again."

I opened my eyes. Judge Colfax's long lean body, with its sloping shoulders, was in the doorway, as black as a tree against a sunset. I saw him duck his head down as if he meant to plough a path through the fire, and then a fat roll of smoke shut off all view of him.

"They're both gone—him and the baby!" roared the depot master. "Lost! Both lost!"

The woman with the flying hair heard this and ran off again, screaming. I listened to the piercing voice of her and the roar and the clanging of bells. Horses came running up behind me, with heavy thuds of hoofs, and voices in chorus went up with every leap of the fire. It was like a delirium with the fever; and the grass, under my hands where I sat, felt moist and cool.

Then all of a sudden the shouting and noise all seemed to stop at once, so there was nothing but the snapping and crackle and hiss of the flames, and a voice of a little boy cried out:—

"The Judge is climbing down the porch! He's got something in his arms!"

"It's the baby!" yelled the depot master, throwing his hat on the ground. "He's saved the baby!"

I began to cry again, and wondered why the people did not cheer. There was only a sort of mumble of little shouts and cries and oaths, and the people fell to one side and the other, as the Judge came toward me.

"Come, Margaret," he said.

I looked up and saw he was all blackened with smoke and soot, except where the sweat had run down in white streaks. His face was close to mine.

"Come! Do you hear?" he said. "I don't believe she's hurt, but we must see. We'll go across to the Danforths'. There is nothing to do here. I've got Julianna!"

Just as if the fire was answering him, there came a great ripping and roaring, as if something had given away and collapsed. A tower of flames shot up out of the roof—a sort of bud of flame that opened into a great flower with petals. It was horrible to see the shingles curl and fall in a blazing stream down onto the ground, as if they were drops of hot metal.

It stupefied me, perhaps; I cannot remember how we went to the neighbor's house or who welcomed us or how we got into the room on the second floor, with a candle burning on the bureau. I noticed how small and ridiculous the flame was and laughed. Indeed, I think when I laughed, I woke up—really woke from my sleep for the first time.

"I went for a walk," the Judge was saying. "I had a headache. I couldn't sleep. I moved the lamp onto the card table. The curtain must have blown into it. We must thank God. We were lucky, very lucky!"

He was pacing up and down there like a caged animal.

"I'm thankful Eleanor, my wife, wasn't at home," he went on, talking very fast. "She has always been so delicate—had so much sorrow—so much trouble. A shock would kill her—a shock like that. My God, we were lucky!"

I got up and pushed the tangled hair back from my face.

"It's all right," he went on with a thick tongue. "Julianna is all right—the little rascal is smoky, but all right. Blow the candle out. It is getting light outside. It's dawn."

The child on the bed kicked its pink feet out from under its long dresses and gave one of those gurgles to show it was awake. The sound made me scream. I had just awakened from my stupidity.

"The other child!" I cried.

"The other!" he said. "What other?"

"The one he left," I whispered. "I had forgotten her."

"My God! so had I. I had only one thought," he cried out. "Only one thought! And now Chalmers's wish has been granted. His—has—gone."

He sat down in a wicker rocking-chair and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

"I never thought," he said again. "I didn't see it anywhere. I didn't look for it. I found Julianna in the middle of the bed."

"Bed!"



That was the only word I had. The light of sunrise had come. The shouts in the street were far away.

"Why, yes," the Judge said. "I—did—I found—"

He stopped, he walked over to the infant and swept it into his arms. He took it to the window and held it up to the light as a person looks at a piece of dressgoods.

"Why, it must be Julianna," he whispered.

Then I heard noises in the back of his throat; he could not catch his breath at first, and when he did, he gave a low groan that seemed to have no end. The baby stared up at him and laughed. It was Monty Cranch's child.



CHAPTER IV

A SUPPRESSION OF THE TRUTH

It was I who took it out of his arms and I who watched him go to the bed and fall across it face downwards, and hide his eyes like a man who cannot stand to see the light of day. If Fate ever played a fiendish trick and punished a square and upright man, it had done it then! I did not dare to speak to him. I did not dare to move. I laid the happy, gurgling baby in my lap and sat there till I felt that every joint in my body had grown tight in its socket.

Once they rapped on the door. The Judge did not move, so I opened it a crack and motioned them away, and sat down again, watching the light turn from pink to the glare of full day, and then a path of warm summer sunlight stretch out across the rug and climb down the wall till it fell onto a basin of water sitting on the floor, and the reflection jumped up to dance its jigs on the ceiling.

I heard the Judge move often enough, but I did not know he was on his feet until I looked up at last, and there he was standing in front of me, with his wild eyes staring down at the child.

He pointed at the little thing with his long forefinger.

"Julianna," said he.

"You are mad, sir," I cried.

"No," said he. "My wife! It must be done to save her happiness. Yes! To save her life."

"To save her?" I repeated after him.

"Yes, a lie," he whispered bitterly. "She has not seen the baby for weeks and weeks."

"She could never know," I cried, understanding what he meant. "That is true, sir. No one could ever tell. The two of them were not different anyway. But you—! You could never forget."

"I know," said he. "Yet it is my happiness against hers, and I have made up my mind. No living soul can ever learn of this. I am safe there. Chalmers will never come back. Nor could he ever know if he did. And so—"

"But the blood," I said, trembling with the thought. "What of that?"

"God help us!" he answered, beating his knuckles on his jaws. "How can I say? But, come what may, I have decided! That child is now Julianna! Give her to me!"

He took the infant in his arms again, pressing it close to him, as if it were a nettle which must be grasped with full courage to avoid the pricks of its thousand barbs.

"What are you?" he whispered to the new Julianna. "What will you be? What is your birthright?"

Well I remember his words, spoken in that half-broken voice; they asked questions which have not been answered yet, I tell you! And yet little attention I paid to them at the moment, for the mischief Welstoke had taught me crept around me again. I could not look at the Judge with his youth dropped off him, his voice and face ten years older and his eyes grown more tender by the grief and love and sacrifice of an hour, without turning away from him. Why? Because a voice from the grave was whispering to me as cool as wet lettuce, to prove that the good or bad of a soul does not end with death.

"Didn't I tell you that skeletons hang in all closets?" it said. "Now, after this night, the Judge, to use a good old phrase, is quite in your power. Bide your time, my dear. We women will come into our own again."

"Excuse me, sir," I said, aloud. "There was a locket on the child's neck. Wouldn't it be well to remove it? It is marked with a name that must be forgotten."

He looked at me gratefully as he fumbled at the trinket with his long, smoke-blackened fingers, while I trembled with my desire to have it safe in my own hands. It was the one thing left to prove the truth. I believe my arms were stretched out for it, when there came a knock on the door.

"You want some breakfast," said a voice. "You poor tired people!"

The Judge, jumping up, placed the little chain and locket on the window sill. I saw it slide down the incline; the screen was up far enough to let it through. It was gone! He gave an exclamation, but the next moment the door had opened and the Danforth family were crowding in.

"Well, Colfax," said the old lawyer, "you're a lucky man. Everybody safe and sound and a very ugly old colonial house burned flat to the ground, with plenty of insurance. Now that you have the new appointment and are going to leave town, it makes a very convenient sale for you."

"Hush!" said his daughter. "The hot coffee is more important. You had better bring the baby down with you. We have sent for milk and nursing-bottles. There, John, that is the baby. You've never seen it. Wasn't I right? Isn't it pretty?"

"My God!" cried the Judge.

"What!" said they.

"I must be tired," he answered. "It has been a strain. It was nothing."

We went out onto the porch for a moment when we were below, and stood out of sight behind the vines. The street was still crowded with curious people, and there was a great black hole with the elm trees, scorched brown, drooping over it—a hole filled with the ashes that were all that was left of the home. Men were playing a hose into it and every time they moved the stream, here or there, a great hiss and cloud of vapor came up. Some one had hung the Judge's straw hat on a lilac bush and there it advertised itself. But the Judge drew himself up and stiffened his body and set his teeth, as he looked at that scene, and I knew then he would not break down again, but would play the game he had begun to the end.

Indeed, I felt his fingers at my sleeve.

"I shall slip away to get the locket," he whispered. "Do you understand? Just a moment. Tell them I will be right back."

He went around the house and I into the hall.

"Judge Colfax will return in a minute," I explained.

"Of course!" said Miss Danforth. "We will wait for him."

The minutes passed. He did not come back.

"Where did you say he went?" asked the old barrister—or lawyer, as you call them.

I shook my head and turned the baby onto my other arm. In a second more I heard his voice on the porch.

"Margaret!" he called.

I went out to him.

His face showed his nervousness again. His fingers trembled as he took the baby from me.

"Go! Look!" he whispered. "I cannot find it!"

This was my chance! I went. The grass below the window had grown long and was matted down; people on the street were watching me and I did not dare to drop on my knees for fear some well-meaning and unwelcome assistance might come for the search. Nevertheless I pushed my toes, I thought, over every inch of the ground below the window. I doubled and redoubled the space. At last the Danforths' cook raised the screen.

"What are ye doing?" said she. "Come in. The baby's food is here already."

What could I say? How could I avoid going? There was no way. But the Judge had not found the locket. Nor had I.

But the Judge had other worries, I'm telling you. He feared the news of the fire would reach his wife in some wrong way and he telegraphed her. She answered by saying she was leaving for home. Brave woman that she was! The telegram said, "It is worth the fire to feel the leap of the heart when I know that you all were saved for me."

"Will she ever know?" he whispered, staring down at the laughing baby, with its little pink, curved mouth. "Will she ever know? I did this for her. God, tell me if I was right!"

"Be easy, sir," I said to him. "Have no fear. There is no one in the world but you and me can tell the story of last night. After these weeks and weeks your wife has been away, there is nobody but me or you who can say this child is not—"

"Julianna," he choked.

"Yes, sir," said I.

I was right. What it cost the Judge's soul I do not know. But that the lie he acted in the name of love was not discovered by the thin woman and wife, whose only beauty was in the light of her eyes, I know very well. The years that she lived—it was after we all came to this city, when the Judge took his new office—were happy enough years for her. Rare enough is the brand of devotion he gave to her; rare enough was the beauty and sweetness of the girl that grew up calling her "Mother."

In all that time never a word did he say to me of what only he and I knew, and I have often thought of what faith he must have had in human goodness—what full, unchanging, constant, noble faith—to trust a servant the way he seemed to trust me by his silence. I have believed ever since that no man or animal can long be mean of soul under the terrible presence of kindness and confidence. For all the trickery that the inherited character of my mother and that Madame Welstoke had poured into my nature was driven bit by bit out of my heart by the trust the Judge put in me, and his looking upon me as a good and honest woman. Long before my love for Julianna had grown strong, I knew that I never could bring myself to use my knowledge of the Judge's secret to wring money from him, or in fact for any other purpose than to feel sorrow for what his fear of the future must have made him suffer.

I knew well enough how the blood of the daughter preyed upon his mind. There is no child that, sooner or later and more than once, does not come to a time of badness and stubbornness and mischief, and when those times came to Julianna, the Judge would watch her as if he expected to see her turn into a snake like magic in a fairy story. More than that, for days he would be odd and silent, and when he thought no one was looking at him, he would sit with his face in his hands, thinking and brooding and afraid.