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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
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