"Margaret," said he, "you look overworked." "Oh, no, sir," I said, half ashamed to tell of my fright. "I'm glad to hear you say so," he answered. "I was about to ask you whether you could add to your duties by taking full charge of Julianna." "The baby!" said I. "Has anything happened to Mrs. Colfax?" "No," he said, a bit excited, "but I'm going to send her away to-day. I trust it will be soon enough. The doctor has been advising it this long time. Mrs. Colfax is on the edge of nervous prostration, and the baby should be taken from her now and put in your care while she is gone." I think I must have shrunk back from him. I remembered the screams. I could hear them again in my ears--terrible, terrible screams--at the river. "While she is gone!" I whispered. "Yes," said he. "What ails you? You have heard the plan before." "But the haste, sir," I said. "What is this dreadful hurry about?" "Not so loud," said he. "You will hear the news soon enough. I may as well tell you. But it must be kept from her at any cost until she is away. A dreadful thing has happened--happened in the night,--not two hundred yards from this house. A woman has been murdered." "A woman!" I said. "Who?" "Her name was Mary Chalmers," he said. "She was an actress. She and her husband and their baby had come up from New York. She was found this daybreak at the dam by one of the factory watchmen. There was an overturned boat. The baby had been left asleep in the boarding-house where they were staying, and the husband had been heard to say that he would take her rowing on the river. He had been drinking. He was caught trying to catch the early morning train, and was still so befuddled that he could only say over and over again that he had no memory of where he had been. He says he is not guilty and has sent for a lawyer. The coroner has gone to the dam. That is the story and my wife must be prevented from suspecting any of it. The man will probably be held. It looks badly for him, and the case, if tried, will come before me. My wife must be kept away until it is all over; she must not suffer the morbid worry." "Did any one hear screams on the river last night?" I asked, biting my finger. "Several heard them," he said, nodding. I felt a great relief from that answer, for I had a dread of being called as a witness and then and there I made up my mind that, come what might, I would tell nothing. "What one sees to-morrow, and what one didn't see yesterday, makes the road easy," Madame Welstoke had been used to say, and I recalled her words and thought highly of their wisdom. And yet I have many the time, wondered whether, if I had told of the creature I had seen, scuttling like a crab over the grass in the orchard, I might not have prevented the grisly prank that Fate has played.