les with
flowers--floated in the room. Amid its old-fashioned and distinguished
bareness--tempered by flowers, and a litter of foreign books--Julie
seemed at last to have found her proper frame. In her severe black
dress, opening on a delicate vest of white, she had a muselike grace;
and the wreath made by her superb black hair round the fine intelligence
of her brow had never been more striking. Her slender hands busied
themselves with Cousin Mary Leicester's tea-things; and every movement
had in Warkworth's eyes a charm to which he had never yet been sensible,
in this manner, to this degree.

"Am I really to say no more of yesterday?" he said, looking at her
nervously.

Her flush, her gesture, appealed to him.

"Do you know what I had before me--that day--when you came in?" she
said, softly.

"No. I cannot guess. Ah, you said something about Lord Lackington?"

She hesitated. Then her color deepened.

"You don't know my story. You suppose, don't you, that I am a Belgian
with English connections, whom Lady Henry met by chance? Isn't that how
you explain me?"

Warkworth had pushed aside his cup.

"I thought--"

He paused in embarrassment, but there was a sparkle of astonished
expectancy in his eyes.

"My mother"--she looked away into the blaze of the fire, and her voice
choked a little--"my mother was Lord Lackington's daughter."

"Lord Lackington's daughter?" echoed Warkworth, in stupefaction. A rush
of ideas and inferences sped through his mind. He thought of Lady
Blanche--things heard in India--and while he stared at her in an
agitated silence the truth leaped to light.

"Not--not Lady Rose Delaney?" he said, bending forward to her.

She nodded.

"My father was Marriott Dalrymple. You will have heard of him. I should
be Julie Dalrymple, but--they could never marry--because of
Colonel Delaney."

Her face was still turned away.

All the details of that famous scandal began to come back to him. His
companion, her history, her relations to others, to himself, began to
appear to him in the most astonishing new lights. So, instead of the
mere humble outsider, she belonged all the time to the best English
blood? The society in which he had met her was full of her kindred. No
doubt the Duchess knew--and Montresor.... He was meshed in a net of
thoughts perplexing and confounding, of which the total result was
perhaps that she appeared to him as she sat there, the slender outline
so quiet and still, more