ld have made a jolly tyrannical slave-owner?" said
Delafield, after a moment's pause.

Julie bent towards him with a charming look of appeal--almost of
penitence. "On the contrary, I think you would have been as good to your
slaves as you are to your friends."

His eyes met hers quietly.

"Thank you. That was kind of you. And as to giving orders, and getting
one's way, don't suppose I let Chudleigh's estate go to ruin! It's
only"--he hesitated--"the small personal tyrannies of every day that I'd
like to minimize. They brutalize half the fellows I know."

"You'll come to them," said Julie, absently. Then she colored, suddenly
remembering the possible dukedom that awaited him.

His brow contracted a little, as though he understood. He made no reply.
Julie, with her craving to be approved--to say what pleased--could not
leave it there.

"I wish I understood," she said, softly, after a moment, "what, or who
it was that gave you these opinions."

Getting still no answer, she must perforce meet the gray eyes bent upon
her, more expressively, perhaps, than their owner knew. "That you shall
understand," he said, after a minute, in a voice which was singularly
deep and full, "whenever you choose to ask."

Julie shrank and drew back.

"Very well," she said, trying to speak lightly. "I'll hold you to that.
Alack! I had forgotten a letter I must write."

And she pretended to write it, while Delafield buried himself in the
newspapers.

XIII

Julie's curiosity--passing and perfunctory as it was--concerning the
persons and influences that had worked upon Jacob Delafield since his
college days, was felt in good earnest by not a few of Delafield's
friends. For he was a person rich in friends, reserved as he generally
was, and crotchety as most of them thought him. The mixture of
self-evident strength and manliness in his physiognomy with something
delicate and evasive, some hindering element of reflection or doubt, was
repeated in his character. On the one side he was a robust, healthy
Etonian, who could ride, shoot, and golf like the rest of his kind, who
used the terse, slangy ways of speech of the ordinary Englishman, who
loved the land and its creatures, and had a natural hatred for a
poacher; and on another he was a man haunted by dreams and spiritual
voices, a man for whom, as he paced his tired horse homeward after a
day's run, there would rise on the grays and purples of the winter dusk
far-shining "cities of