He felt a fluttering touch upon his hair and started up. There before him on the desk lay a faded leaf of paper--a page closely written over in twirly, dim writing. He lifted it up and held it to the light, his nostrils catching a scent wraith-frail and delicate, like a dead pansy's ghost-- No--no--no! Why did you write it? Why did you put it into words? For now I must keep it always. I cannot destroy it. You _knew_ I would not--_could_ not---let you do what you beg me to! Never, never! I am not so mad. Nor are you, really. It is not your best self speaking in this letter. Sometime-- His gaze became fixed. He gave a hoarse cry--a mist was before his eyes. He snatched at the top of the yellowed sheet--it was dated twenty years before, and the hand-writing, how familiar! He laid the leaf flat in the lamp-light and read it through, with every nerve throbbing to a memory that had started afresh, as instinct as though days, not years, had sifted their dust upon it: Sometime you will thank me--will think of this only as a ghastly indiscretion from which you were caught away in time. We do not make the world we live in, and it is a thousand times stronger than we are. No, if we play the game we must stick to the rules. To think of overstepping that boundary, in such a desperate fashion, gives my fastidious sense a strange recoil--something like that curious shame and confusion that associates itself with a dream in which one finds one's-self scantily clad in the midst of wondering strangers! No--no! I do not think I shall send this letter--but perhaps I may at the end. For I am going away. I sail to-morrow. Shall I see you again--ever--ever? What will you think-- That was all. It broke off abruptly as though the writer had laid it aside, never to be finished. In the silent library the Judge looked at that mute witness as at one risen from the dead. Twenty years of absence and silence--twenty years out of his ken, save to the thriving memory! For how long the hand that had penned those lines had been dust, yet the poor symbols of ink and paper persisted to confront him now! How had the sheet come to be on that desk that she had bequeathed him? It had not lain there a moment before. He brought the lamp and examined the desk attentively, pulling out every tiny drawer, sounding each carved partition, twisting and tugging at every projecting portion of the ornamentation. With a thin, metal paper-knife he explored each warp and crevice. But his search was fruitless. If the leaf had slipped from some crack--loosened, perhaps, by the fall of the brass bowl upon it that day--the old desk kept its secret.