hundred yards from this house. A woman has been murdered."

"A woman!" I said. "Who?"

"Her name was Mary Chalmers," he said. "She was an actress. She and her
husband and their baby had come up from New York. She was found this
daybreak at the dam by one of the factory watchmen. There was an
overturned boat. The baby had been left asleep in the boarding-house
where they were staying, and the husband had been heard to say that he
would take her rowing on the river. He had been drinking. He was caught
trying to catch the early morning train, and was still so befuddled that
he could only say over and over again that he had no memory of where he
had been. He says he is not guilty and has sent for a lawyer. The
coroner has gone to the dam. That is the story and my wife must be
prevented from suspecting any of it. The man will probably be held. It
looks badly for him, and the case, if tried, will come before me. My
wife must be kept away until it is all over; she must not suffer the
morbid worry."

"Did any one hear screams on the river last night?" I asked, biting my
finger.

"Several heard them," he said, nodding.

I felt a great relief from that answer, for I had a dread of being
called as a witness and then and there I made up my mind that, come what
might, I would tell nothing. "What one sees to-morrow, and what one
didn't see yesterday, makes the road easy," Madame Welstoke had been
used to say, and I recalled her words and thought highly of their
wisdom. And yet I have many the time, wondered whether, if I had told of
the creature I had seen, scuttling like a crab over the grass in the
orchard, I might not have prevented the grisly prank that Fate has
played.

That afternoon my mistress, in spite of her gentle protests, was taken
to the train by the Judge and Doctor Turpin, who I've always remembered
as an old fool, trying to wipe the prickly heat off his forehead with a
red-bordered silk handkerchief. One of the neighbors, clinking with jet
beads till she sounded like a pitcher of ice water coming down the hall,
went on the journey to the mountain sanitarium with Mrs. Colfax, as a
sort of companion, and when all the fuss of the departure and the slam
of the old cab doors and the neighing of the livery-stable hearse horses
was over, I was left alone with the baby Julianna and the Judge.

The child was laying on its fat little naked back, kicking its feet at
me, when the father came upstairs.

"Please, sir," s