ken to her. I could see her tears glisten on
her cheeks in the fading light.

"Little girl!" I cried aloud. "Come to me! It's I! Little girl!"

The sound of my own voice startled me. I found myself sitting in the
Denver railroad station with my hands clasped around my thin knees.

No man's own blood ever haunted him more than mine. I had not seen the
child, yet I loved her. She had no knowledge of my existence, yet she
seemed to call to me. I suffered a dreadful thought--the fear that I
should die before I saw her and feasted my eyes upon my own. I struggled
to keep myself from going to seek her. I felt as one who, being dead,
impotently desires to return to the world and touch the hands of the
living. Year after year the desire grew strong to rise from my grave and
call out that she was mine.

At last I yielded to my temptation--fool that I was! I came eastward. I
made cautious inquiry. I arrived in this city where I had heard the
Judge had gone. The mere fact of proximity to her made me tremble as I
alighted from the train. I had expected difficulties in finding her. But
when I telephoned to the name I had found in the book and heard a voice
say that the Judge had just gone out with his daughter, I felt that I
was in a dream. A strange faintness came over me. The glass door of the
booth reflected my image--the face of a frightened old man. It was
remarkable that I did not fall forward sprawling, unconscious.

Before seeking a lodging I sat for hours in a park. Young girls passed,
fresh, beautiful, laughing, going home from school.

"Can that be she?" I asked a dozen times, looking after one of those
chosen from among the others. "What can she be like? What would she say
to me?"

Suddenly I realized again that I did not exist, that she could not know
that I had ever existed, that whatever pain it might cost me, she must
never know. If I saw her, it must be as a ghost peeping through a
crevice in the wall. These were my thoughts as I sat on the park bench
hour after hour until a little outcast pup--a thin, bony creature,
kicked and beaten, came slinking out of the gathering dusk and licked my
hand. It was the first love I had felt in years. My whole being screamed
for it. I caught up the pariah and warmed its shivering body in my
arms. This was the dog that, two years later, I lost along with the
locket in the Judge's old garden where I had gone indiscreetly, praying
that I might get a peep in the window and see