Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 28, 2025
I was absurdly eager to go at once to Julianna, and the fact that the hour for dinner had finally arrived, and that the remaining time was short, only served to increase my impatience the more.
Sometimes I'd wheel Julianna down the street to the court-house, and then I'd see men with fingers raised as if they were all barristers, or imitating barristers, standing on the court-house steps and whispering and talking and laughing, and the sheriff, with a blue coat and mixed trousers and gray side whiskers, sitting on a campstool under the big elm tree, like a man at an old soldiers' home, and factory-girl witnesses, giggling as they went up and disappeared into the dark corridors, and the drone of voices coming out of the open windows, and perhaps the jury walking in pairs and acting very important, with a deputy sheriff taking them over to the Lenox Café for their lunch.
Immediately I turned toward Julianna, but she, instead of coming forward in the manner of one ready to say good-night, idly turned the pages of a book on the old table, and then, walking across the room, stood near the chessboard with the pink glow of the droplight upon her face, and looked up at me, saying as plainly as words, "Stay."
I wonder that I made so blind a bargain. I wonder that I did not ask him, before it was too late, what his conversation with Margaret Murchie in the garden had meant and what secret it was that lurked like a clawed creature of the night, ready to eat away, bit by bit, the happiness of an innocent man. When I left Judge Colfax that day, the only questions in my mind concerned Julianna.
There is something that tells me that little Julianna will never live." "Hush, the nonsense!" I answered her, laughing at her white, frightened face. "Trouble enough you'll have with her teething without borrowing more from such things as Death! Look out the window, ma'am, at the snow that covers everything, and be thankful that we are not having a green winter."
And yet, hardly had I so thought than a strange sense of loneliness came over me, the dingy buildings about the square seemed like so many squatting personalities, depressed and brooding, and out of that gloomy picture came the image of Julianna, so fresh, so smiling, and so fair that for a moment I almost forgot that it was a creation of my fancy. It brought back to me my love for her.
I had the utmost confidence in Julianna, and indeed, without thinking much of my own troubles, I passed that long vigil in the library only with regret that I could not wrest away from the true and noble woman who had promised to be my wife, all the terrible grief which, alone in the chamber above, she must have been suffering.
"I'm thankful Eleanor, my wife, wasn't at home," he went on, talking very fast. "She has always been so delicate had so much sorrow so much trouble. A shock would kill her a shock like that. My God, we were lucky!" I got up and pushed the tangled hair back from my face. "It's all right," he went on with a thick tongue. "Julianna is all right the little rascal is smoky, but all right.
She was lying at the bottom of the stairs, her face buried in her hands and her broad back rising and falling with slow and silent tides of grief. Julianna and her father were together the old woman's life. One half had gone. "Come, Margaret," said I softly. "Very well, sir," she answered after a minute, and rising, straightened her cap, preparing for duty like a broken-hearted soldier.
The Judge watched every movement I made, his eyes staring out at me from under the brush of their brows. At last, when I had seated myself, he came and sat in front of me, laid the papers on his knees and smoothed them with the palm of his shaking hand. "My boy," he said, "I wrote these papers, not for you, but for my Julianna. Never has a man had a task so calculated to break his heart.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking