She turned about as one caught red-handed in guilt, and in doing so, moved far enough to one side to expose the last remnants of written sheets of paper, which flames were rapidly consuming. A moment more and these were crisp ashes which whirled about the hearth with a soft rustle before they fell into heaps of sooty fragments. Whatever the Judge had written with infinite pain had now been destroyed. And as I looked into her eyes, I saw, too, that infinite pain had attended their destruction. Her expression had in it horror, shame, apprehension, and excruciating grief: never had I believed that a face, naturally so innocent and so happy, could have been so distorted with mature and terrible emotions as hers had become in the hours that had passed.
“Julie! my Julie!” I cried.
For answer her fingers reached out toward me in mute appeal, her body followed, and, crawling to my feet, she clutched the air as if trying to reach my hands with her own, and then fell forward, flat upon the floor, unconscious. If in that moment she appeared a groveling thing, it was only for a moment. Before I could stoop to raise her, she had regained her senses with two or three sharp inhalations and a fluttering of her eyelids, had thrust my hands from her and struggled to her feet.
“Go!” she whispered, retreating. “It is unthinkable! Go! Never come near me!”
“No—no—no!” I said. “Julianna, tell me! What has happened? It is not you who speaks!”
“No,” she answered. “It is not I.”
“I say it is not you who say these things,” I repeated. “Who, then?”
“My father. It is his voice. It is his message. And what he has been, I am. There is no other way.”
I moved toward her.
“Tell me this terrible menace behind us—this thing that threatens us—that works its evil upon us. I will not believe that any fault of it is yours.”