"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 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 nebulæ. 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 Dieudonné 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!