the blood of the daughter preyed upon his mind.
There is no child that, sooner or later and more than once, does not
come to a time of badness and stubbornness and mischief, and when those
times came to Julianna, the Judge would watch her as if he expected to
see her turn into a snake like magic in a fairy story. More than that,
for days he would be odd and silent, and when he thought no one was
looking at him, he would sit with his face in his hands, thinking and
brooding and afraid.

I found out, too, that he had tried to trace the father, John Chalmers,
back to the days when he wore his own name, and it may have been that
then he would have strived to go back to Monty's father and grandfather,
and so on, as far as he could go. I knew about it because one day I was
looking through his desk drawers--prying has always been a failing with
me!--and I found a letter from Mr. Roddy, the newspaper reporter, who I
had almost forgotten. Mr. Roddy said that he never had been able to find
anything of the murderer's history before the time he was employed in
Bermuda, and I know my heart jumped with pleasure, for I could not see
what good it would do for the Judge to know; and I felt, for some
reason, that the name of Cranch was one that both he and I would not
have smudged with the owner's misdeeds and folly. You may say that it
was strange that pictures of love--the love which came and went like the
shadow of a flying bird, flitting across a wall--should have still been
locked up in an old woman's heart. But they were there to be called
back, as they are now, with all their colors as clear and bright as the
pictures of Julianna's future that the Judge used to see pass before the
eyes of his fear.

At first I used to think that the master was principally in terror
because of the chance that some strange trick of fate would show his
wife the truth. The older and more beautiful and the more lovable and
affectionate the little daughter grew, and the weaker and whiter the
poor deceived woman, the worse the calamity would have been. Perhaps I
thought this was the Judge's fear, because of its being my own. I was
always feeling that the blow was about to fall, and I prayed that Mrs.
Colfax would no longer be living when it came.

But at last she was gone. She died when Julianna was eleven, and had
long braids of hair that would have been the envy of the mermaids, and
eyes that had begun to grow deep like pools of cool water, and a fig