I wished, too, that she had said she would meet me in her afternoon walks to the Monument and wondered that, if she loved me, she was able to forbid herself a meeting, even though she had felt that good sense demanded a period of reflection and a readjustment of view, so that when we did see each other again, it would be with firmer minds and steadier hearts. I would have gladly foregone all this value of reserve and restraint for one look at her face, one touch of her sleeve, one word from her tender, curving lips.
And yet I was happy in those days--so painfully happy that I heard voices telling me that such happiness does not last, that ecstasies are tricks of fate by which man's joy is fattened for slaughter, that from some ambush a horrible thing was peering.
Strangely enough, these fears were connected in no way with the warnings which I had had from my eavesdropping or even from the definite threat which had come out of my grotesque experience with the Sheik of Baalbec. The piece of writing, which had begun, "You are in danger," I had dropped into a file of papers, and though I suppose it is somewhere among them now, I have never yielded to the temptation to look at it again. I may have thought of it merely to add to the opinion of Jarvis that the writing was not Julianna's, the apparently indisputable fact that, at the moment the warning had been written, Julianna was, by the word of the apartment house doorman, waiting for me in the little reception room. Furthermore, with my success in winning her, with the intoxication of it, I began to look upon the strange and unexplained matters which had so perplexed me as trivial illusions beneath the consideration of good sense. However much you may be surprised at my willful blindness, your wonder cannot equal that which I myself feel to-night.
And now, when I am about to tell you of that memorable Friday, I must impress upon you that no detail of it is distorted in my memory, that so clear and vivid were the impressions upon my senses that, were I to live to the age of pyramids, I could recall every slight sequence with accuracy. I say this because you are a physician and as such, no doubt,--and it is no different in the case of us lawyers,--have learned the absurd fallibility of ordinary human testimony, not excluding that which proceeds from the highest and most honorable type of our civilization.