ay. I don't want you to
speak with him for a week. I will tell him then. Perhaps you think it is
strange. But Friday, when he knows, you may come."

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

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

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

"On Friday," she said.

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

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

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

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

Strangely enough, these fears were connected in no way with the warnings
which I had had from my eavesdropping or even from the definite threat
which had come out of my grotesque experience with the Sheik of Baalbec.
The piece of writing, which had begun, "You are in danger," I had
dropped into a file of papers, and though I suppose it i