lie read these obscure processes in Warkworth's mind with perfect
clearness. She was powerless to change them; but that afternoon she had,
at any rate, beaten her wings against the bars, and the exhaustion and
anguish of her revolt, her reproaches, were still upon her.

The spring night had fallen. The room was hot, and she threw a window
open. Some thorns in the garden beneath had thickened into leaf. They
rose in a dark mass beneath the window. Overhead, beyond the haze of the
great city, a few stars twinkled, and the dim roar of London life beat
from all sides upon this quiet corner which still held Lady Mary's
old house.

Julie's eyes strained into the darkness; her head swam with weakness and
weariness. Suddenly she gave a cry--she pressed her hands to her heart.
Upon the darkness outside there rose a face, so sharply drawn, so
life-like, that it printed itself forever upon the quivering tissues of
the brain. It was Warkworth's face, not as she had seen it last, but in
some strange extremity of physical ill--drawn, haggard, in a cold
sweat--the eyes glazed, the hair matted, the parched lips open as though
they cried for help. She stood gazing. Then the eyes turned, and the
agony in them looked out upon her.

Her whole sense was absorbed by the phantom; her being hung upon it.
Then, as it faded on the quiet trees, she tottered to a chair and hid
her face. Common sense told her that she was the victim of her own tired
nerves and tortured fancy. But the memory of Cousin Mary Leicester's
second sight, of her "visions" in this very room, crept upon her and
gripped her heart. A ghostly horror seized her of the room, the house,
and her own tempestuous nature. She groped her way out, in blind and
hurrying panic--glad of the lamp in the hall, glad of the sounds in the
house, glad, above all, of Therese's thin hands as they once more stole
lovingly round her own.

XVII

The Duchess and Julie were in the large room of Burlington House. They
had paused before a magnificent Turner of the middle period, hitherto
unseen by the public, and the Duchess was reading from the catalogue in
Julie's ear.

She had found Julie alone in Heribert Street, surrounded by books and
proofs, endeavoring, as she reported, to finish a piece of work for Dr.
Meredith. Distressed by her friend's pale cheeks, the Duchess had
insisted on dragging her from the prison-house and changing the current
of her thoughts. Julie, laughing, hesitating, i