round her Duke's neck, and beg his
pardon for all these weeks of desertion! She said to herself, ruefully,
that her babies would indeed have forgotten her.

* * * * *

Yet she stood stoutly to her post, and the weeks passed quickly by. It
was the dramatic energy of the situation--so much more dramatic in truth
than either she or Meredith suspected--that made it such a strain upon
the onlookers.

One evening they had left the boat at Tremezzo, that they might walk
back along that most winning of paths that skirts the lake between the
last houses of Tremezzo and the inn at Cadenabbia. The sunset was nearly
over, but the air was still suffused with its rose and pearl, and
fragrant with the scent of flowering laurels. Each mountain face, each
white village, either couched on the water's edge or grouped about its
slender campanile on some shoulder of the hills, each house and tree and
figure seemed still penetrated with light, the glorified creatures of
some just revealed and already fading world. The echoes of the evening
bell were floating on the lake, and from a boat in front, full of
peasant-folk, there rose a sound of singing, some litany of saint or
virgin, which stole in harmonies, rudely true, across the water.

"They have been to the pilgrimage church above Lenno," said Julie,
pointing to the boat, and in order to listen to the singing, she found a
seat on a low wall above the lake.

There was no reply, and, looking round her, she saw with a start that
only Delafield was beside her, that the Duchess and Meredith had
already rounded the corner of the Villa Carlotta and were out of sight.

Delafield's gaze was fixed upon her. He was very pale, and suddenly
Julie's breath seemed to fail her.

"I don't think I can bear it any longer," he said, as he came close to
her.

"Bear what?"

"That you should look as you do now."

Julie made no reply. Her eyes, very sad and bitter, searched the blue
dimness of the lake in silence.

Delafield sat down on the wall beside her. Not a soul was in sight. At
the Cadenabbia Hotel, the _table d'hote_ had gathered in the visitors; a
few boats passed and repassed in the distance, but on land all
was still.

Suddenly he took her hand with a firm grasp.

"Are you never going to forgive me?" he said, in a low voice.

"I suppose I ought to bless you."

Her face seemed to him to express the tremulous misery of a heart
deeply, perhaps irrevocabl