“I am grateful,” he said.
When I looked up at him after lowering my head in acknowledgment of his thanks, I saw again that wonderful smile of benevolence, which, given to me once before in his office, I believe could only have been bestowed by one who had had a lifelong practice in love of humanity. Indeed, he only directed it at me for a moment, and then turned his face a little aside toward the back of the room, as if he wished to send that expression through the walls and spread over the whole world its beaming radiance.
You may, then, well imagine my surprise when, without a word or a motion of any other part of his body, I saw that smile fade from his face. It disappeared as if a blast of the night wind, entering the room, had dried it, crumbled it, and blown it away. In its place I now saw the terrible, eye-widened, and fixed stare which we recognize as the facial sign of some abject, unreasoning terror, or of death, after the clutch of some fatal agony.
“Judge Colfax!” I exclaimed.
I waited. I thought I saw his head move a little as if he had heard me, but with that motion there came a click, the sound of teeth coming together.
“You are ill,” I said, half rising from my chair.
His lips moved, but the stare in his eyes remained the same.
“It has come,” he said in his throat.
I jumped toward him. He did not stir.
“Judge!” I cried.