red.

Monty just shivered again and bowed his head. It was hard to believe he
was a murderer. Everything seemed like a dream, with Monty's chest
heaving and falling like the pulse of a body's own heart.

"You never want her to know of you--anything about you?" asked the
Judge.

"No," choked Monty. "Never!"

"Every man has good in him," said the Judge slowly. "You had better
go--now!"

Without a word, then, Monty got up and went. He did not rush off like
the reporter. He stopped and touched the baby's dirty little dress with
the tips of his fingers. And then he went, and the front door closed
slowly and creaked, and the screen door closed slowly and creaked, and
his shoes came down slowly on the walk and creaked, and the iron
gate-latch creaked. I went to the window and looked out one side of the
flapping curtain, and I saw Monty Cranch move along the fence and raise
his arms and stop and move again. In the moonlight, with its queer
shadows, he still looked like half man and half ape, scuttling away to
some place where everything is lost in nothing.

"We can't do anything more to-night," said the Judge, touching my
shoulder. "Take the child upstairs."

"Yes, sir," said I.

"Stop!" he said huskily. "Let me look at her. What is in that body? What
is in that soul? What is it marked with? What a mystery!"

"It is, indeed," I answered.

"They look so much alike when they come into the world," he said,
talking to himself. "So much alike! I thought it was Julianna."

"And yet--" I said.

He wiped his tortoise-shell glasses as he looked at me and nodded.

"I shall not go to bed now," said he. "I shall stay down here. Give the
child clean clothing. And then to-morrow--"

I felt the warmth of the little body in the curve of my arm and whether
for its own sake or its father's, I do not know, but my heart was big
for it. In spite of my feeling and the water in my eyes, I shut my
teeth.

"To-morrow," I said.

How little we knew.

How little I knew, for after I had washed the child, laid it in the big
vacant bed, and blown out the candle, I remember I stood there in the
dark beside little Julianna's crib with my thoughts not on the child at
all. It was the ghost of Monty Cranch that walked this way and that in
front of me, sometimes looking into my eyes and saying, "What are _you_
doing here?" and other times running up through the meadow away from his
crime and again standing before a great shining Person and s