walls, Miss Julia leaped to the great fundamental conclusion of her own
life.

She saw out far into the time of star dust and the soft vague light and
the whirling nebulae. She saw all the great truths--saw the one great
truth for any woman--saw her hero standing here--the dream father of her
own dream child.... But Miss Julia never grasped the real, the inferior,
the human truth at all. On the contrary, she made a vast and very
beautiful mistake. She had assigned a dream father to her dream son, but
no more. That Judge William Henderson was the father indeed of Dieudonne
Lane she no more suspected than she suspected herself to be his actual
mother. So, therefore, it had been only a path of dreams that Horace
Brooks had followed when he saw her look from the boy's to the father's
face. It was only a path of dreams now that again her eyes followed, as
she looked from the portrait of the youth to the man who stood before
her. Ah! Miss Julia. Poor, little, happy Miss Julia!

"So now, Judge," said she at last, "you can clear him, after all. It
will be so fine for you to do that--so dramatic--so fitting, won't it?"

If Judge Henderson could have spoken, perhaps he would have done so; but
she misunderstood his choking silence. She was miles away from the
actual truth; and never was to know it in all her life.

"Don hadn't any father," said she. "His father's dead long ago, or
Aurora would have told me. He's in his grave--and she'll not open it
even for me, who have loved her so much. But if he had had a father..."
Her voice ceased wistfully.

Judge Henderson coughed, his hands at his throat. She did not see his
face.

"... If only he could have had a father like--this!"

Her own little hand fell gently--ever so gently--on the lithographed
face of the great man, her hero, her champion--who always was to be such
for her. It was the boldest act of all her quiet life. Her hand was very
gentle, but as it fell, perhaps it dealt the heaviest blow to the
vanity, the egotism, the innate selfishness of the man ever he had
known, even in this swift series of blows he was now receiving. For once
remorse, regret, understanding smote him sore. He saw how little he had
earned what life had given him. He saw--himself!

"But then," she added hastily, and flushed to the roots of her hair--"I
beg your pardon. That could not have been, of course. Don's father--the
way he was born--why, _Don's_ father couldn't have been a man like
_you