ho imitate the boldness of the
character and dress of the adventuress or the stage and opera favorite.
It has become a tiresome feature of our modern life with the insidious
faculty of corrupting the manners even of families who know better. She
was so different! And in that moment I knew her superiority as a woman.
I could not speak.

We exchanged no words. Yet as we looked at each other in the manner of
children, the Judge, I thought, sensed a significance. When my eye
sought his, I found a cloud upon his stern face, but immediately, as if
he had tossed a haunting thought aside, he laughed.

"Julianna," said he, "this is the Mr. Estabrook who is as insane as I.
That is, he devotes no end of time and energy and seriousness to the
game of chess. We have never yet met each other on the field of battle.
Some afternoon, here in this room, however--"

She did not allow him to finish; she said hastily that she must witness
the contest.

"Then at my home," he said, beaming at me. "To-morrow will you come to
dinner?"

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 t