Why, Don didn't do it--I _told_ you he couldn't have done it!
Didn't I?

"So now it's all cleared--and I'm so glad!" she concluded, breathless.

"What's all this you are telling me, Miss Julia? Why, this is basic
evidence--it does end the case! But you say there were witnesses to this
confession?" A vast relief came into Judge Henderson's ashen face.

"Yes, yes, the sheriff and Eph Adamson and Nels Jorgens--they all heard
him. And the poor boy--his body's in the justice's office now. They've
sent a messenger after his mother--poor thing--oh, poor woman that she
is!"

"Where is Adamson now--where's the sheriff?"

"As I said, the sheriff is here in the building somewhere. Old Eph
Adamson won't speak to anyone. He seems half out of his own mind now.
But he doesn't blame the sheriff. They say he's sorry for Aurora. Why?

"So you see," said Miss Julia, leaping over a vast sea of intervening
facts, "everything's all right now." And she sighed a great soft sigh
of complete content. "Of course Don didn't do it. I knew that all
along."

"Where's Anne--my ward?" asked Judge Henderson suddenly. "I want to
speak to her a moment."

"I don't know," said Miss Julia. But she smiled, and all her choicest
dimples came out in fine array. "I shouldn't wonder if she was in jail!
Now I've got to go over to Aurora's. All this news, you know----"

But Miss Julia did not hasten away. To the contrary, she seemed not
unwilling to linger yet a time--unconsciously. The truth was that all
her heart was happy, with the one supreme happiness possible for her in
all her life. For a second time she was here, standing face to face with
her hero. So she sighed and smiled and dimpled and talked over this
thing and that--until at length she turned and caught sight of the two
pictures, the one on the wall, the other on the desk--which both men had
left there, forgotten.

"Why, what's this?" said she. "I gave Mr. Brooks this one this morning,"
she said. "He might at least have returned it to me. He said he wanted
to borrow it for a little while. Was he here?"

"He just went away," said Judge Henderson uneasily. "He was here just
now."

Miss Julia was taking up the little photograph and looking from it to
the lithograph with soft eyes.

"Isn't it fine?" said she. "Fine!" But she did not say which one of the
two faces she saw before her was most in her mind.... And then in the
little room with its dusty windows and its tumbled books and map-hung