CHAPTER II A PLEDGE TO THE JUDGE There is a peculiar honesty about true affection for woman. It is for the flirtations, the light and frivolous intimacies that a man smooths his hair, picks out his scarf, and purchases a new stick. Somehow it seems to me that a gentleman of natural high honor will always present his average self to the one woman. That he should be attentive is natural, that he should be affected is repellent to my notions. Perhaps it was for this reason that without preparation I closed my desk and walked up to meet Julianna, as I would have walked home to my own bachelor quarters. She was waiting for me! "I have been expecting you," said she, with her hand upon the dog's grizzled head, and in that frank and simple statement there was more charm than in all the false feminine reserve in the universe. "I did not come before," I told her, "because I felt that you might believe me presuming too much." "Why?" said she in the manner of a child. I could not answer. I merely gazed at her. She was half leaning, half sitting on the retaining wall of the park, and her skin, which was flecked with the shadows of new maple leaves above her, was lighted not only by the yellow rays of the afternoon sun, but also with the bright colors which her brisk walk had brought to the soft surface. I assure you, she made a pretty picture. "I would have been glad to see you yesterday," she said slowly, marking with the toe of one shoe upon the gravel. "You have been one of my father's younger friends a long time." "There is nothing the matter!" I cried. "I can't tell," she said. "He is old, you know, and I can explain it in no other way." "He is not ill?" "No. But if, for instance, his physician had told him he had not long to live, and he felt something give way within him--that might cause it." I suppressed the anxious note in my voice as I said, "Cause what? You have not said, Miss Colfax." She laughed. "That is true. I haven't, have I?" Serious again, she went on. "He seems worried. Something seems to follow him about--some thought, some apprehension, some worry." "It is a new difficulty somewhere that has come up in the trial of a case." She shook her head. "Let us walk," she said. "No, it is not that--nothing ordinary. A word from me and he would explain. But this time when I ask, he merely smiles and says, 'Nothing, Julie, nothing.'" "Can it be that I am the cause?" I said before I could stop myself. "Has he found out that we--" "I told him," she said, "that we--" She stopped there, too, and looked at me. "No," she went on. "It is something else. He went out for a stroll night before last. Usually he is gone a half-hour at least. But this time he had hardly had time to go down the steps before I heard his key in the door again and the feet of 'Laddie' on the hall floor. I ran out to ask if he had forgotten anything, and it was a dreadful shock to me."