peak of them to me--till
eternity."

"What then?--I promise," I said.

"Then I will as solemnly swear to be as good and faithful, as true and
ever-loving wife as God will let me be," she said softly; "and may He
forgive me for what I do, because I love you."

She held out her arms to me, begging to be taken into mine, and when I
had touched her she fell back, with her limp body in the curve of my
elbow, and, looking up at me, offered her parted lips to the first kiss
I had ever given her.

CHAPTER VI

THE MOVING FIGURE AGAIN

Such was a betrothal, sir, so extraordinary that had my natural
repulsion for the unusual permitted me to have told it before, it would
have been with belief that others would think me a man deluded by his
own fancies. And yet these are facts I have told you--cold and bare and
sufficient to have proved to me that the adventure and romance mourned
for by some men are not dead, but, were it only known, still flourish,
concealed in the hearts and experience of such matter-of-fact persons as
myself.

Our marriage, too, was not of the conventional sort. It took place a
fortnight later without any of the celebration usual in such cases. The
death of the Judge, the fact that Julianna had no other immediate
relatives to act as her protectors, and that my own father, whose
affection for me has always been of a rather cold and undemonstrative
type, approved not only of my choice of a wife, but also of my plan for
an immediate marriage, argued against delay. Furthermore, Julianna
herself, with a sad but charming little smile, again and again assured
herself in my presence that she knew her own heart and that for her
part there was no need to prolong a period of preparation.

Often, in those days, she spoke to me of her father, with the deepest
affection, not as if he were dead, but rather as if his spirit still
remained in the old house. She had one of those rare minds that reject
the disagreeable superstitious affectations concerning death and that
overcome hysterical grief. To be sure, for hours at a time she would
suffer an extraordinary melancholy, and then, in my agony of curiosity,
I believed that the spectre which had first appeared before her, the
night of the Judge's death, was whispering to her again. True, however,
to my solemn oath, which I have always kept, I asked her nothing, and
she always emerged from these periods of me