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

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

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

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

"Julianna!" I exclaimed softly.

She turned about as one caught red-handed in guilt, and in doing so,
moved far enough to one side to expose the last remnants of written
sheets of paper, which flames were rapidly consuming. A moment more and
these were crisp ashes which whirled about the hearth with a soft rustle
before they fell into heaps of sooty fragments. Whatever the Judge had
written with infinite pain had now been destroyed. And as I looked