into
her eyes, I saw, too, that infinite pain had attended their destruction.
Her expression had in it horror, shame, apprehension, and excruciating
grief: never had I believed that a face, naturally so innocent and so
happy, could have been so distorted with mature and terrible emotions as
hers had become in the hours that had passed.

"Julie! my Julie!" I cried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I moved toward her.

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

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

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

Another little cry issued from her compressed lips.

"You were willing not to know?"

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

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