I remember that Julianna had raised her eyes, that they were smiling, and that I received the definite, convincing impression that I was looking at a girl who never had given her love away. I tell you that one feels a truth like that by instinct, and that a woman wears not only her spotlessness, but also her purity of thought, like a faint halo. Yet at that moment I knew she was glad that I had accepted the invitation: there was a blushing eagerness in her eyes, upon her lips, in the movement of her graceful hands. For the rest of the morning I was half dizzy with the mad sense of triumph, of conquest--that strange onslaught of the emotions which gives no quarter to the disordered phalanx of reason. I must admit that when I met Judge Colfax on the court-house steps the next afternoon to walk home with him, I had not given a thought to his daughter's forebears or security of place in the social structure. In fact, the social structure had vanished; an individual had, at least for the time, filled its place. I even jumped when the first sentence the Judge addressed to me began with her name. "My daughter plays an excellent game herself," he said, as if in explanation of her interest. "In fact, I may say, with an old man's modesty, that there are only two persons in this city who can win from me consistently. She is one." "And the other, sir?" I asked as we turned our faces toward the hot stare of the late afternoon sun. "The other," he said, "is an automaton. I have named it the Sheik of Baalbec. But I believe he calls himself the Player of the Rolling Eye." It is impossible for me to say why the mere mention of the fanciful name of an automatic chessplayer should have caused me to feel a peculiar uneasiness--the sensation of apprehension. I am not susceptible ordinarily to the so-called warnings of voices from within. And yet I suppose the Judge saw a look of inquiry on my face, for he drew out his large, old-fashioned gold watch, which he carried in his trousers pocket, with his keys. "We will stop there," said he. "There is time. The automaton has a corner of the lower hallway in the old Natural History Museum. It's not far out of our way, and if you will start with a problem I will give you and play with him, it will afford me an opportunity to measure you before our game this evening." Such were the circumstances which brought me into a mystery not yet solved, the ending of which I fear to guess. In a modern era, when it is commonly supposed that skeletons no longer hang in closets, that day after day brings commonplace occurrences or, at the best, trivial abnormalities to be explained to-morrow, that romance is dead, it is strange that Fate should have picked me, when, by custom and my own desire, I am aloof from all things turbulent, morbid, and uncanny, to play an unwilling part in so extraordinary a drama, or, possibly, a tragedy.