employ those methods any more. I
liked the Judge and I might say I loved his wife, but there was still
something in me that kept me watching for secrets or skeletons in the
closet, and little did I know then how my chance would come.

The baby was born in January,--a daughter--and as beautiful a little
creature as you would want to see, with red-brown hair and a pink mouth
hard to beat. Of course I've seen parents fond enough of children, but
never any so fond of one that their mouths were hushed as they looked at
her. The truth was that, as for Mrs. Colfax, she was so bound up in the
child that she suffered.

"Margaret," she said to me many a time, "a mother's heart has strange
instincts and, I fear, true ones. There is something that tells me that
little Julianna will never live."

"Hush, the nonsense!" I answered her, laughing at her white, frightened
face. "Trouble enough you'll have with her teething without borrowing
more from such things as Death! Look out the window, ma'am, at the snow
that covers everything, and be thankful that we are not having a green
winter."

"Something will happen," she said. And I believe it was her worry and
nervousness that kept her from getting her strength back and wore her
thinner and thinner. She would sit in her window that looked down the
slope to the river, with Julianna in her lap, and gaze out at the
melting snow, or, later, at the first peep of green in the meadows
between the two factories up and down the valley, and at those times I
would notice how tired and patient her face looked, though it would all
spring up into smiles when she heard the voice of the Judge, who had
come in the front door.

Then finally there came a night I remember well. It was about the full
moon in the early days of April, but a wind had come up with a lot of
clouds blowing across the sky. Maybe it was at ten o'clock--just after I
had gone to bed, anyway, and had got to sleep--when I heard the
screams--terrible, terrible screams. And I thought they were the screams
of a woman.

I jumped up, threw open my window, and tried to look through the night
toward the river. I could hear something splash once or twice in the
water, and then all was still--still as the grave.

You know how a body feels waked out of a sleep like that. Though it was
a warm breeze that blew and though I've never been timid, I was shaking
like a sheet of paper. It was a minute or two before I could get it out
of my mind