s of the lake, the distant hollows of high glaciers filled with
purple shadow, the precipices of the Rochers de Naye, where the new snow
was sparkling in the sun, the cool wind that blew towards him from the
gates of Italy, down the winding recesses of that superb valley which
has been a thoroughfare of nations from the beginning of time.

Not a boat on the wide reaches of the lake; not a voice or other sound
of human toil, either from the vineyards below or the meadows above.
Meanwhile some instinct, perhaps also some faint movements in her room,
told him that Julie was no less wakeful than himself. And was not that a
low voice in the room above him--the trained voice and footsteps of a
nurse? Ah, poor little heiress, she, too, watched with sorrow!

A curious feeling of shame, of self-depreciation crept into his heart.
Surely he himself of late had been lying down with fear and rising up
with bitterness? Never a day had passed since they had reached
Switzerland but he, a man of strong natural passions, had bade himself
face the probable truth that, by a kind of violence, he had married a
woman who would never love him--had taken irrevocably a false step, only
too likely to be fatal to himself, intolerable to her.

Nevertheless, steeped as he had been in sadness, in foreboding, and,
during this by-gone night, in passionate envy of the dead yet beloved
Warkworth, he had never been altogether unhappy. That mysterious
_It_--that other divine self of the mystic--God--the enwrapping,
sheltering force--had been with him always. It was with him now--it
spoke from the mysterious color and light of the dawn.

How, then, could he ever equal Julie in _experience_, in the true and
poignant feeling of any grief whatever? His mind was in a strange,
double state. It was like one who feels himself unfairly protected by a
magic armor; he would almost throw it aside in a remorseful eagerness
to be with his brethren, and as his brethren, in the sore weakness and
darkness of the human combat; and then he thinks of the hand that gave
the shield, and his heart melts in awe.

"_Friend of my soul and of the world, make me thy tool--thy instrument!
Thou art Love! Speak through me! Draw her heart to mine_."

At last, knowing that there was no sleep in him, and realizing that he
had brooded enough, he made his way out of the hotel and up through the
fresh and dew-drenched meadows, where the haymakers were just appearing,
to the Les Avants st