"You have had a disquieting letter?"

The voice was Julie\'s. Delafield was standing, apparently in thought, at the farther corner of the little, raised terrace of the hotel. She approached him with an affectionate anxiety, of which he was instantly conscious.

"I am afraid I may have to leave you to-night," he said, turning towards her, and holding out the letter in his hand.

It contained a few agitated lines from the Duke of Chudleigh.

"They tell me my lad can\'t get over this. He\'s made a gallant fight, but this beats us. A week or two--no more. Ask Mrs. Delafield to let you come. She will, I know. She wrote to me very kindly. Mervyn keeps talking of you. You\'d come, if you heard him. It\'s ghastly--the cruelty of it all. Whether I can live without him, that\'s the point."

"You\'ll go, of course?" said Julie, returning it.

"To-night, if you allow it."

"Of course. You ought."

"I hate leaving you alone, with this trouble on your hands," said Jacob, in some agitation. "What are your plans?"

"I could follow you next week. Aileen comes down to-day. And I should like to wait here for the mail."

"In five days, about, it should be here," said Delafield.

There was a silence. She dropped into a chair beside the balustrade of the terrace, which was wreathed in wistaria, and looked out upon the vast landscape of the lake. His thought was, "How can the mail matter to her? She cannot suppose that he had written--"

Aloud he said, in some embarrassment, "You expect letters yourself?"

"I expect nothing," she said, after a pause. "But Aileen is living on the chance of letters."

"There may be nothing for her--except, indeed, her letters to him--poor child!"

"She knows that. But the hope keeps her alive."

"And you?" thought Delafield, with an inward groan, as he looked down upon her pale profile. He had a moment\'s hateful vision of himself as the elder brother in the parable. Was Julie\'s mind to be the home of an eternal antithesis between the living husband and the dead lover--in which the latter had forever the beau r?le?

Then, impatiently, Jacob wrenched himself from mean thoughts. It was as though he bared his head remorse-fully before the dead man.

"I will go to the Foreign Office," he said, in her ear, "as I pass through town. They will have letters. All the information I can get you shall have at once."

"Thank you, mon ami", she said, almost inaudibly.

Then she looked up, and he was startled by her eyes. Where he had expected grief, he saw a shrinking animation.

"Write to me often," she said, imperiously.

"Of course. But don\'t trouble to answer much. Your hands are so full here."

She frowned.

"Trouble! Why do you spoil me so? Demand--insist--that I should write!"

"Very well," he said, smiling, "I demand--I insist!"

She drew a long breath, and went slowly away from him into the house. Certainly the antagonism of her secret thoughts, though it persisted, was no longer merely cold or critical. For it concerned one who was not only the master of his own life, but threatened unexpectedly to become the master of hers.

She had begun, indeed, to please her imagination with the idea of a relation between them, which, while it ignored the ordinary relations of marriage, should yet include many of the intimacies and refinements of love. More and more did the surprises of his character arrest and occupy her mind. She found, indeed, no "plaster saint." Her cool intelligence soon detected the traces of a peevish or stubborn temper, and of a natural inertia, perpetually combated, however, by the spiritual energy of a new and other self exfoliating from the old; a self whose acts and ways she watched, sometimes with the held breath of fascination, sometimes with a return of shrinking or fear. That a man should not only appear but be so good was still in her eyes a little absurd. Perhaps her feeling was at bottom the common feeling of the sceptical nature. "We should listen to the higher voices; but in such a way that if another hypothesis were true, we should not have been too completely duped."

She was ready, also, to convict him of certain prejudices and superstitions which roused in her an intellectual impatience. But when all was said, Delafield, unconsciously, was drawing her towards him, as the fowler draws a fluttering bird. It was the exquisite refinement of those spiritual insights and powers he possessed which constantly appealed, not only to her heart, but--a very important matter in Julie\'s case--to her taste, to her own carefully tempered instinct for the rare and beautiful.

He was the master, then, she admitted, of a certain vein of spiritual genius. Well, here should he lead--and even, if he pleased, command her. She would sit at his feet, and he should open to her ranges of feeling, delights, and subtleties of moral sensation hitherto unknown to her.

Thus the feeling of ennui and reaction which had marked the first weeks of her married life had now wholly disappeared. Delafield was no longer dull or pedantic in her eyes. She passed alternately from moments of intolerable smart and pity for the dead to moments of agitation and expectancy connected with her husband. She thought over their meeting of the night before; she looked forward to similar hours to come.

Meanwhile his relation towards her in many matters was still na?vely ignorant and humble--determined by the simplicity of a man of some real greatness, who never dreamed of claiming tastes or knowledge he did not possess, whether in small things or large. This phase, however, only gave the more value to one which frequently succeeded it. For suddenly the conversation would enter regions where he felt himself peculiarly at home, and, with the same unconsciousness on his part, she would be made to feel the dignity and authority which surrounded his ethical and spiritual life. And these contrasts--this weakness and this strength--combined with the man-and-woman element which is always present in any situation of the kind, gave rise to a very varied and gradually intensifying play of feeling between them. Feeling only possible, no doubt, for the raffinés of this world; but for them full of strange charm, and even of excitement.

Delafield left the little inn for Montreux, Lausanne, and London that afternoon. He bent to kiss his wife at the moment of his departure, in the bare sitting-room that had been improvised for them on the ground floor of the hotel, and as she let her face linger ever so little against his she felt strong arms flung round her, and was crushed against his breast in a hungry embrace. When he released her with a flush and a murmured word of apology she shook her head, smiling sadly but saying nothing. The door closed on him, and at the sound she made a hasty step forward.

"Jacob! Take me with you!"

But her voice died in the rattle and bustle of the diligence outside, and she was left trembling from head to foot, under a conflict of emotions that seemed now to exalt, now to degrade her.

Half an hour after Delafield\'s departure there appeared on the terrace of the hotel a tottering, emaciated form--Aileen Moffatt, in a black dress and hat, clinging to her mother\'s arm. But she refused the deck--chair, which they had spread with cushions and shawls.

"No; let me sit up." And she took an ordinary chair, looking round upon the lake and the little flowery terrace with a slow, absorbed look, like one trying to remember. Suddenly she bowed her head on her hands.

"Aileen!" cried Lady Blanche, in an agony.

But the girl motioned her away. "Don\'t, mummy. I\'m all right."

And restraining any further emotion, she laid her arms on the balustrade and gazed long and calmly into the purple depths and gleaming snows of the Rh?ne valley. Her hat oppressed her and she took it off, revealing the abundance of her delicately golden hair, which, in its lack of lustre and spring, seemed to share in the physical distress and loss of the whole personality.

The face was that of a doomed creature, incapable now of making any successful struggle for the right to live. What had been sensibility had become melancholy; the slight, chronic frown was deeper, the pale lips more pinched. Yet intermittently there was still great sweetness, the last effort of a "beautiful soul" meant for happiness, and withered before its time.

As Julie stood beside her, while Lady Blanche had gone to fetch a book from the salon, the poor child put out her hand and grasped that of Julie.

"It is quite possible I may get the letter to-night," she said, in a hurried whisper. "My maid went down to Montreux--there is a clever man at the post-office who tried to make it out for us. He thinks it\'ll be to-night."

"Don\'t be too disappointed if nothing comes," said Julie, caressing the hand. Its thinness, its icy and lifeless touch, dismayed her. Ah, how easily might this physical wreck have been her doing!

The bells of Montreux struck half-past six. A restless and agonized expectation began to show itself in all the movements of the invalid. She left her chair and began to pace the little terrace on Julie\'s arm. Her dragging step, the mournful black of her dress, the struggle between youth and death in her sharpened face, made her a tragic presence. Julie could hardly bear it, while all the time she, too, was secretly and breathlessly waiting for Warkworth\'s last words.

Lady Blanche returned, and Julie hurried away.

She passed through the hotel and walked down the Montreux road. The post had already reached the first houses of the village, and the postman, who knew her, willingly gave her the letters.

Yes, a packet for Aileen, addressed in an unknown hand to a London address, and forwarded thence. It bore the Denga postmark.

And another for herself, readdressed from London by Madame Bornier. She tore off the outer envelope; beneath was a letter of which the address was feebly written in Warkworth\'s hand: "Mademoiselle Le Breton, 3 Heribert Street, London."

She had the strength to carry her own letter to her room, to call Aileen\'s maid and send her with the other packet to Lady Blanche. Then she locked herself in....

Oh, the poor, crumpled page, and the labored hand-writing!

"Julie, I am dying. They are such good fellows, but they can\'t save me. It\'s horrible.

"I saw the news of your engagement in a paper the day before I left Denga. You\'re right. He\'ll make you happy. Tell him I said so. Oh, my God, I shall never trouble you again! I bless you for the letter you wrote me. Here it is.... No, I can\'t--can\'t read it. Drowsy. No pain--"

And here the pen had dropped from his hand. Searching for something more, she drew from the envelope the wild and passionate letter she had written him at Heribert Street, in the early morning after her return from Paris, while she was waiting for Delafield to bring her the news of Lord Lackington\'s state.

The small table d\'h?te of the Hotel Michel was still further diminished that night. Lady Blanche was with her daughter, and Mrs. Delafield did not appear.

But the moon was hanging in glory over the lake when Julie, unable to bear her room and her thoughts any longer, threw a lace scarf about her head and neck, and went blindly climbing through the upward paths leading to Les Avants. The roads were silver in the moonlight; so was the lake, save where the great mountain shadows lay across the eastern end. And suddenly, white, through pine-trees, "Jaman, delicately tall!"

The air cooled her brow, and from the deep, enveloping night her torn heart drew balm, and a first soothing of the pulse of pain. Every now and then, as she sat down to rest, a waking dream overshadowed her. She seemed to be supporting Warkworth in her arms; his dying head lay upon her breast, and she murmured courage and love into his ear. But not as Julie Le Breton. Through all the anguish of what was almost an illusion of the senses, she still felt herself Delafield\'s wife. And in that flood of silent speech she poured out on Warkworth, it was as though she offered him also Jacob\'s compassion, Jacob\'s homage, mingled with her own.

Once she found herself sitting at the edge of a meadow, environed by the heavy scents of flowers. Some apple-trees with whitened trunks rose between her and the lake a thousand feet below. The walls of Chillon, the houses of Montreux, caught the light; opposite, the deep forests of Bouveret and St. Gingolphe lay black upon the lake; above them rode the moon. And to the east the high Alps, their pure lines a little effaced and withdrawn, as when a light veil hangs over a sanctuary.

Julie looked out upon a vast freedom of space, and by a natural connection she seemed to be also surveying her own world of life and feeling, her past and her future. She thought of her childhood and her parents, of her harsh, combative youth, of the years with Lady Henry, of Warkworth, of her husband, and the life into which his strong hand had so suddenly and rashly drawn her. Her thoughts took none of the religious paths so familiar to his. And yet her reverie was so far religious that her mind seemed to herself to be quivering under the onset of affections, emotions, awes, till now unknown, and that, looking back, she was conscious of a groping sense of significance, of purpose, in all that had befallen her. Yet to this sense she could put no words. Only, in the end, through the constant action of her visualizing imagination, it connected itself with Delafield\'s face, and with the memory of many of his recent acts and sayings.

It was one of those hours which determine the history of a man or woman. And the august Alpine beauty entered in, so that Julie, in this sad and thrilling act of self-probing, felt herself in the presence of powers and dominations divine.

Her face, stained with tears, took gradually some of the calm, the loftiness of the night. Yet the close-shut, brooding mouth would slip sometimes into a smile exquisitely soft and gentle, as though the heart remembered something which seemed to the intelligence at once folly and sweetness.

What was going on within her was, to her own consciousness, a strange thing. It appeared to her as a kind of simplification, a return to childhood; or, rather, was it the emergence in the grown mind, tired with the clamor of its own egotistical or passionate life, of some instincts, natural to the child, which she, nevertheless, as a child had never known; instincts of trust, of self-abandonment, steeped, perhaps, in those tears which are themselves only another happiness?...

But hush! What are our poor words in the presence of these nobler secrets of the wrestling and mounting spirit!

On the way down she saw another figure emerge from the dark.

"Lady Blanche!"

Lady Blanche stood still.

"The hotel was stifling," she said, in a voice that vainly tried for steadiness.

Julie perceived that she had been weeping.

"Aileen is asleep?"

"Perhaps. They have given her something to make her sleep."

They walked on towards the hotel.

Julie hesitated.

"She was not disappointed?" she said, at last, in a low voice.

"No!" said the mother, sharply. "But one knew, of course, there must be letters for her. Thank God, she can feel that his very last thought was for her! The letters which have reached her are dated the day before the fatal attack began--giving a complete account of his march--most interesting--showing how he trusted her already--though she is such a child. It will tranquillize her to feel how completely she possessed his heart--poor fellow!"

Julie said nothing, and Lady Blanche, with bitter satisfaction, felt rather than saw what seemed to her the just humiliation expressed in the drooping and black-veiled figure beside her.

Next day there was once more a tinge of color on Aileen\'s cheeks. Her beautiful hair fell round her once more in a soft life and confusion, and the roses which her mother had placed beside her on the bed were not in too pitiful contrast with her frail loveliness.

"Read it, please," she said, as soon as she found herself alone with Julie, pushing her letter tenderly towards her. "He tells me everything--everything! All he was doing and hoping--consults me in everything. Isn\'t it an honor--when I\'m so ignorant and childish? I\'ll try to be brave--try to be worthy--"

And while her whole frame was shaken with deep, silent sobs, she greedily watched Julie read the letter.

"Oughtn\'t I to try and live," she said, dashing away her tears, as Julie returned it, "when he loved me so?"

Julie kissed her with a passionate and guilty pity. The letter might have been written to any friend, to any charming child for whom a much older man had a kindness. It gave a business-like account of their march, dilated on one or two points of policy, drew some humorous sketches of his companions, and concluded with a few affectionate and playful sentences.

But when the wrestle with death began, Warkworth wrote but one last letter, uttered but one cry of the heart, and it lay now in Julie\'s bosom.

A few days passed. Delafield\'s letters were short and full of sadness. Elmira still lived; but any day or hour might see the end. As for the father--But the subject was too tragic to be written of, even to her. Not to feel, not to realize; there lay the only chance of keeping one\'s own courage, and so of being any help whatever to two of the most miserable of human beings.

At last, rather more than a week after Delafield\'s departure, came two telegrams. One was from Delafield--"Mervyn died this morning. Duke\'s condition causes great anxiety." The other from Evelyn Crowborough--"Elmira died this morning. Going down to Shropshire to help Jacob."

Julie threw down the telegrams. A rush of proud tears came to her eyes. She swept to the door of her room, opened it, and called her maid.

The maid came, and when she saw the sparkling looks and strained bearing of her mistress, wondered what crime she was to be rebuked for. Julie merely bade her pack at once, as it was her intention to catch the eight o\'clock through train at Lausanne that night for England.

Twenty hours later the train carrying Julie to London entered Victoria Station. On the platform stood the little Duchess, impatiently expectant. Julie was clasped in her arms, and had no time to wonder at the pallor and distraction of her friend before she was hurried into the brougham waiting beyond the train.

"Oh, Julie!" cried the Duchess, catching the traveller\'s hands, as they drove away. "Julie, darling!"

Julie turned to her in amazement. The blue eyes fixed upon her had no tears, but in them, and in the Duchess\'s whole aspect, was expressed a vivid horror and agitation which struck at Julie\'s heart.

"What is it?" she said, catching her breath. "What is it?"

"Julie, I was going to Faircourt this morning. First your telegram stopped me. I thought I\'d wait and go with you. Then came another, from Delafield. The Duke! The poor Duke!"

Julie\'s attitude changed unconsciously--instantly.

"Yes; tell me!"

"It\'s in all the papers to-night--on the placards--don\'t look out!" And the Duchess lifted her hand and drew down the blinds of the brougham. "He was in a most anxious state yesterday, but they thought him calmer at night, and he insisted on being left alone. The doctors still kept a watch, but he managed in some mysterious way to evade them all, and this morning he was missed. After two hours they found him--in the river that runs below the house!"

There was a silence.

"And Jacob?" said Julie, hoarsely.

"That\'s what I\'m so anxious about," exclaimed the Duchess. "Oh, I am thankful you\'ve come! You know how Jacob\'s always felt about the Duke and Mervyn--how he\'s hated the notion of succeeding. And Susan, who went down yesterday, telegraphed to me last night--before this horror--that he was \'terribly strained and overwrought.\'"

"Succeeding?" said Julie, vaguely. Mechanically she had drawn up the blind again, and her eyes followed the dingy lines of the Vauxhall Bridge Road, till suddenly they turned away from the placards outside a small stationer\'s shop which announced: "Tragic death of the Duke of Chudleigh and his son."

The Duchess looked at her curiously without replying. Julie seemed to be grappling with some idea which escaped her, or, rather, was presently expelled by one more urgent.

"Is Jacob ill?" she said, abruptly, looking her companion full in the face.

"I only know what I\'ve told you. Susan says \'strained and overwrought.\' Oh, it\'ll be all right when he gets you!"

Julie made no reply. She sat motionless, and the Duchess, stealing another glance at her, must needs, even in this tragic turmoil, allow herself the reflection that she was a more delicate study in black-and-white, a more refined and accented personality than ever.

"You won\'t mind," said Evelyn, timidly, after a pause; "but Lady Henry is staying with me, and also Sir Wilfrid Bury, who had such a bad cold in his lodgings that I went down there a week ago, got the doctor\'s leave, and carried him off there and then. And Mr. Montresor\'s coming in. He particularly wanted, he said, just to press your hand. But they sha\'n\'t bother you if you\'re tired. Our train goes at 10.10, and Freddie has got the express stopped for us at Westonport--about three in the morning."

The carriage rolled into Grosvenor Square, and presently stopped before Crowborough House. Julie alighted, looked round her at the July green of the square, at the brightness of the window-boxes, and then at the groom of the chambers who was taking her wraps from her--the same man who, in the old days, used to feed Lady Henry\'s dogs with sweet biscuit. It struck her that he was showing her a very particular and eager attention.

Meanwhile in the Duchess\'s drawing--room a little knot of people was gathered--Lady Henry, Sir Wilfrid Bury, and Dr. Meredith. Their demeanor illustrated both the subduing and the exciting influence of great events. Lady Henry was more talkative than usual. Sir Wilfrid more silent.

Lady Henry seemed to have profited by her stay at Torquay. As she sat upright in a stiff chair, her hands resting on her stick, she presented her characteristic aspect of English solidity, crossed by a certain free and foreign animation. She had been already wrangling with Sir Wilfrid, and giving her opinion freely on the "socialistic" views on rank and property attributed to Jacob Delafield. "If he can\'t digest the cake, that doesn\'t mean it isn\'t good," had been her last impatient remark, when Sir Wilfrid interrupted her.

"Only a few minutes more," he said, looking at his watch. "Now, then, what line do we take? How much is our friend likely to know?"

"Unless she has lost her eyesight--which Evelyn has not reported--she will know most of what matters before she has gone a hundred yards from the station," said Lady Henry, dryly.

"Oh, the streets! Yes; but persons are often curiously dazed by such a gallop of events."

"Not Julie Le Breton!"

"I should like to be informed as to the part you are about to play," said Sir Wilfrid, in a lower voice, "that I may play up to it. Where are you?"

Both looked at Meredith, who had walked to a distant window and was standing there looking out upon the square. Lady Henry was well aware that he had not forgiven her, and, to tell the truth, was rather anxious that he should. So she, too, dropped her voice.

"I bow to the institutions of my country," she said, a little sparkle in the strong, gray eye.

"In other words, you forgive a duchess?"

"I acknowledge the head of the family, and the greater carries the less."

"Suppose Jacob should be unforgiving?"

"He hasn\'t the spirit."

"And she?"

"Her conscience will be on my side."

"I thought it was your theory that she had none?"

"Jacob, let us hope, will have developed some. He has a good deal to spare."

Sir Wilfrid laughed. "So it is you who will do the pardoning?"

"I shall offer an armed and honorable peace. The Duchess of Chudleigh may intrigue and tell lies, if she pleases. I am not giving her a hundred a year."

There was a pause.

"Why, if I may ask," said Sir Wilfrid, at the end of it, "did you quarrel with Jacob? I understand there was a separate cause:"

Lady Henry hesitated.

"He paid me a debt," she said, at last, and a sudden flush rose in her old, blanched cheek.

"And that annoyed you? You have the oddest code!"

Lady Henry bit her lip.

"One does not like one\'s money thrown in one\'s face."

"Most unreasonable of women!"

"Never mind, Wilfrid. We all have our feelings."

"Precisely. Well, no doubt Jacob will make peace. As for--Ah, here comes Montresor!"

A visible tremor passed through Lady Henry. The door was thrown open, and the footman announced the Minister for War.

"Her grace, sir, is not yet returned."

Montresor stumbled into the room, and even with his eye-glasses carefully adjusted, did not at once perceive who was in it.

Sir Wilfrid went towards him.

"Ah, Bury! Convalescent, I hope?"

"Quite. The Duchess has gone to meet Mrs. Delafield."

"Mrs.--?" Montresor\'s mouth opened. "But, of course, you know?"

"Oh yes, I know. But one\'s tongue has to get oiled. You see Lady Henry?"

Montresor started.

"I am glad to see Lady Henry," he replied, stiffly.

Lady Henry slowly rose and advanced two steps. She quietly held out her hand to him, and, smiling, looked him in the face.

"Take it. There is no longer any cause of quarrel between us. I raise the embargo."

The Minister took the hand, and shook his head.

"Ah, but you had no right to impose it," he said, with energy.

"Oh, for goodness sake, meet me half-way," cried Lady Henry, "or I shall never hold out!"

Sir Wilfrid, whose half-embarrassed gaze was bent on the ground, looked up and was certain that he saw a gleam of moisture in those wrinkled eyes.

"Why have you held out so long? What does it matter to me whether Miss Julie be a duchess or no? That doesn\'t make up to me for all the months you\'ve shut............