I cannot describe that I could use no guiding
hand. I hungered for the responsibility of a father. I cried out aloud
that now, in this choosing of men, I should have a word. I writhed as I
had often writhed, because, loving her too much, I was forbidden to
perform the offices of my affection. The tears that had come before now
came again, and I wept for hours, as I had wept on other occasions.

I began a new and indiscreet observation. I found that this young man
was a real menace. I followed him as he walked with her, liking him no
better when I saw a look in my daughter's eyes that never had been there
before. I would have interfered with his lovemaking, had I been able.

"God," I whispered, "I am only a ghost!"

Then chance gave me, I thought, an opportunity to strike at his courage.
He is here. He can tell you of the message the automaton scrawled for
him on a bit of paper. But he cannot tell the anxious hours, the frantic
hours, a tormented outcast spent before that message was written,
lurking in front of the Judge's house, watching with eyes red with
sleeplessness for every little sign of what was going on. Nor can he
tell you of the terror that came into a lonely creature's soul the night
the Judge came down his front steps and met a shadow of the past, face
to face. It is only I who may describe the horror of that meeting. The
recognition of my identity by a dog who whined and cowered, and then by
a man, whose breath gurgled in his throat and whose skin turned white,
are things that no man knows but me.

I can see the Judge's face now. It looked upon me with the same accusing
expression that I knew so well, and I slunk away believing that the
worst had at last come. He had seen behind the mask of my years, my
physical decline and my suffering. In one glance, before he turned
dizzily back toward the house, he had taken my secret away from me. He
knew me!

The madness of desperation came over me then. It was that which caused
me to write the message through the hand of my automaton; it was that
which led me to conceive the folly that, being known by the Judge to be
living, I might, in the name of my love for my daughter, tell him out of
my own mouth that I would never molest them.

I had stood all that man could bear. For the second time in my
desperation, I entered the garden. I climbed the balcony. The Judge was
there. Estabrook was there. They both saw me. I fled with their staring
eyes pursuing me.