t in the
grass, I started toward my home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet, hardly had I so thought than a strange sense of loneliness
came over me, the dingy buildings about the square seemed like so many
squatting personalities, depressed and brooding, and out of that gloomy
picture came the image of Julianna, so fresh, so smiling, and so fair
that for a moment I almost forgot that it was a creation o