She looked up at me quickly.
“Will you close those long windows for me?” she asked, after a moment, pointing toward the back of the room. “At the front of the house we are level with the street; at the rear, however, the old walled garden is almost another story below us. It is damp, I think, even after a spring day as tender and sunny as this has been.”
I hastened to do her bidding.
“There is a tangle of old-fashioned flowers in our little city inclosure,” she called after me. “The Judge likes it that way—as mother used to like it. There is a balcony with an old wistaria vine just outside the window.”
“And the moon,” said I under my breath.
The pranks that fate plays—or whatever one chooses to call the strange domination of our chance happenings—are wonderful and at times seem malicious. I am certain that it brought me onto the iron-railed balcony just beyond the French windows at the beat of that second.
The old garden, though small and flanked by the ugly backs of city houses, seemed to hold within its brick inclosure a world full of white liquid moonlight. Shrubs, however, which had grown in disorder under the walls, threw dark and steady shadows across the patches of lesser vegetation. The tops of early blossoms and nodding grasses showed beyond these spaces of blackness. Suddenly, as I looked down, I heard a click like that of a gate-latch, and a second later I saw, projecting from one of the fantastic patterns of shade, a round disk of shining surface.
There are moments when the sight is puzzled to determine the character of such an object. I could not make out the nature of this bobbing, moving circle that followed along the irregular line of wall shrubbery. Then, when it was nearer, I saw in a flash that it was the top of a silk hat. I could see, too, the stooping shoulders of the man who wore it, I could see that he was proceeding cautiously as if he feared to attract attention, and at last, when he paused beneath the balcony, I could see a face with an anxious expression that turned upward toward me. I drew back behind the thick-leaved vine; for the man was Judge Colfax.
Of all persons he was the last to act as if he sought concealment in what he did, the last to be guilty or wear the appearance of guilt. Had he been a stranger, I might have assumed that he had come to make a call below stairs, but the fact that it was my host, a judge of probate, with a reputation for lifelong honor and refinement, filled me with the keenest curiosity. I gripped the old iron railing with my hands and leaned over.
The Judge waited for a moment before a door opened slowly somewhere beneath the balcony and a stream of artificial light escaped through the crack and for a brief second lay like a piece of yellow ribbon across the grass. Then he was joined by some one whose voice I recognized as that of Margaret Murchie.