I think he longed for sympathy and wanted the
relief of speech. Finally he spoke. It was late one night and he had his
hand on the stair rail, when he heard me locking the window in the hall.
He turned quickly.

"Margaret," he whispered.

"Yes, sir," I answered.

"Thank God, she is a woman and not a man," he said, out of a clear sky;
"for a woman is better protected against herself."

For a moment he seemed to be thinking; then he looked at the floor.

"Does Julianna ever take a glass of sherry or claret when I am not at
dinner?" he asked. "I thought it had gone quickly."

"Why, no!" I replied.

He nodded the way he did when he was satisfied--the way a toyshop
animal's head nods--less and less until it stops.

"I'm sorry I asked," he said. "Good-night."

What he had said was enough to show me that his imagination had been
sharpened and sharpened and sharpened. Perhaps you know how it is when
some one does not come back until late at night, and how, when you are
waiting, listening to the ticking of the clock, or the sounds of
footsteps or cab horses in the street, coming nearer and nearer and then
going farther and farther away, you can imagine all kinds of things like
highway robbery and accidents and hospitals, and the telephone seems
ready to jump at you with a piece of bad, bad news. So it was with him,
except that he did not see pictures of what had happened, but pictures
of what might come. I knew that he feared the character that might crop
out of the good and beautiful girl, and I thought sometimes, too, that
he still had fits of believing, though the past was buried under the
years, that sometime the ugly ghost of the truth would come rapping on
the window pane in the dead o' night.

Perhaps I can say, in spite of the fact that we never knew of a
certainty, that it did. We had cause to know that, barring the Judge and
me and Monty Cranch, wherever he might have been, a new and strange and
evil thing showed itself as the fourth possessor of our secret.

Julianna, in that year, had begun going to a new school--fashionable,
you might call it, and many is the time I have smiled, remembering how
it came about. The woman with the old-fashioned cameo brooch, who kept
it, did everything to invite the Judge to send his daughter there,
except to ask him outright, and afterward I heard she had rejoiced to
have the one she called "the best-born girl in all the city" at her
school, which she boasted, in the pre