she grew
dumbly restive. She felt herself, also, too much observed, too much
thought over, made too often, if the truth were known, the subject of
religious or mystical emotion.

More and more, also, was she conscious of strangeness and eccentricity
in the man she had married. It often seemed to that keen and practical
sense which in her mingled so oddly with the capacity for passion that,
as they grew older, and her mind recovered tone and balance, she would
probably love the world disastrously more and he disastrously less. And
if so, the gulf between them, instead of closing, could but widen.

One day--a showery day in early June--she was left alone for an hour,
while Delafield went down to Montreux to change some circular notes.
Julie took a book from the table and strolled out along the lovely road
that slopes gently downward from Charnex to the old field-embowered
village of Brent.

The rain was just over. It had been a cold rain, and the snow had crept
downward on the heights, and had even powdered the pines of the Cubly.
The clouds were sweeping low in the west. Towards Geneva the lake was
mere wide and featureless space--a cold and misty water, melting into
the fringes of the rain-clouds. But to the east, above the Rhone
valley, the sky was lifting; and as Julie sat down upon a midway seat
and turned herself eastward, she was met by the full and unveiled glory
of the higher Alps--the Rochers de Naye, the Velan, the Dent du Midi. On
the jagged peaks of the latter a bright shaft of sun was playing, and
the great white or rock-ribbed mass raised itself above the mists of the
lower world, once more unstained and triumphant.

But the cold _bise_ was still blowing, and Julie, shivering, drew her
wrap closer round her. Her heart pined for Como and the south; perhaps
for the little Duchess, who spoiled and petted her in the common,
womanish ways.

The spring--a second spring--was all about her; but in this chilly
northern form it spoke to her with none of the ravishment of Italy. In
the steep fields above her the narcissuses were bent and bowed with
rain; the red-browns of the walnuts glistened in the wet gleams of sun;
the fading apple-blossom beside her wore a melancholy beauty; only in
the rich, pushing grass, with its wealth of flowers and its branching
cow-parsley, was there the stubborn life and prophecy of summer.

Suddenly Julie caught up the book that lay beside her and opened it with
a hasty hand. It w