anvil and hammer,
so that I could beat it into a pulp of gold. I wished a crack in the
earth might open miles deep so I could drop it in.

I went into the kitchen where the cook was busy with her pastry, and up
to my own room. It was there I began to think sensibly. I believed that
whoever might want to come now and say, "I know. That is a murderer's
child," no longer would have the proof. I believed that Julianna was
safe again. So long as I had the locket and Monty Cranch was lost in the
depths of time and perhaps dead, no real harm, I thought, could come to
her. Often enough I had remembered the moment when Mr. Roddy had begged
the Judge to condemn Monty to death by an accusation of a crime he never
committed, and how I had said, perhaps, the words that prevented the
master from agreeing to the devilish plot. I had often wondered if I had
not been the cause of all the Judge's troubles by my speaking then. This
thought, for the moment, prevented me from hurrying downstairs in time
to catch the Judge before he went out. I could hear him hunting around
the corners for his grapevine stick, humming a tune.

"What good, after all, to tell?" said I to myself. "Just as he kept a
secret for the happiness of his wife, I will keep one for the sake of
his peace of mind."

I heard the front door close and knew that he had gone.

"If I took the locket to him," I thought, "what would he believe? Only
that I had had it in my possession all these years. After all, I am only
a servant. He would be suspicious. He would believe I had invented the
story of finding it in the yard. It would spoil all his trust in me and
that would break my heart."

So my thoughts went around and a week passed, in which there was not a
night that I did not sit in my bedroom window, looking out at the cold
garden and the black alley, expecting to see some one lurking there. A
hundred times I took the locket out of its hiding-place and wondered
what to do, and at last it came to me that the first question the Judge
would ask was why I had not told him at once. That was enough to clinch
the matter; until to-night the secret has been my own and you can blame
me or not, as you see fit.

It was painful enough for me--a lonely old maid--with nothing but
memories of a wasted girlhood and no one to help me see the right of
things. Many is the night I have wet my pillow with tears, being afraid
that I had always played the wrong part and would finally be the c