rdid thoughts--you
can't. Lady Henry thought me an intriguer--I am one. It is in my blood.
And I don't know whether, in the end, I could understand your language
and your life. And if I don't, I shall make you miserable."

She looked up, her slender frame straightening under what was, in truth,
a noble defiance.

Delafield bent over her and took both her hands forcibly in his own.

"If all that were true, I would rather risk it a thousand times over
than go out of your life again--a stranger. Julie, you have done mad
things for love--you should know what love is. Look in my
face--there--your eyes in mine! Give way! The dead ask it of you--and it
is God's will."

And as, drawn by the last, low-spoken words, Julie looked up into his
face, she felt herself enveloped by a mystical and passionate tenderness
that paralyzed her resistance. A force, superhuman, laid its grasp upon
her will. With a burst of tears, half in despair, half in revolt, she
submitted.

XXII

In the first week of May, Julie Le Breton married Jacob Delafield in the
English Church at Florence. The Duchess was there. So was the Duke--a
sulky and ill-resigned spectator of something which he believed to be
the peculiar and mischievous achievement of his wife.

At the church door Julie and Delafield left for Camaldoli.

"Well, if you imagine that I intend to congratulate you or anybody else
upon that performance you are very much mistaken," said the Duke, as he
and his wife drove back to the "Grand Bretagne" together.

"I don't deny it's--risky," said the Duchess, her hands on her lap, her
eyes dreamily following the streets.

"Risky!" repeated the Duke, shrugging his shoulders. "Well, I don't want
to speak harshly of your friends, Evelyn, but Miss Le Breton--"

"Mrs. Delafield," said the Duchess.

"Mrs. Delafield, then"--the name was evidently a difficult
mouthful--"seems to me a most undisciplined and unmanageable woman. Why
does she look like a tragedy queen at her marriage? Jacob is twice too
good for her, and she'll lead him a life. And how you can reconcile it
to your conscience to have misled me so completely as you have in this
matter, I really can't imagine."

"Misled you?" said Evelyn.

Her innocence was really a little hard to bear, and not even the beauty
of her blue eyes, now happily restored to him, could appease the mentor
at her side.

"You led me plainly to believe," he repeated, with emphasis, "that if I
helped her th