ream. A plunge into one of its cool basins
retempered the whole man. He walked back through the scented
field-paths, resolutely restraining his mind from the thoughts of the
night, hammering out, indeed, in his head a scheme for the establishment
of small holdings on certain derelict land in Wiltshire belonging to
his cousin.

As he was descending on Charnex, he met the postman and took his
letters. One among them, from the Duke of Chudleigh, contained a most
lamentable account of Lord Elmira. The father and son had returned to
England, and an angry, inclement May had brought a touch of pneumonia to
add to all the lad's other woes. In itself it was not much--was, indeed,
passing away. "But it has used up most of his strength," said the Duke,
"and you know whether he had any to waste. Don't forget him. He
constantly thinks and talks of you."

Delafield restlessly wondered when he could get home. But he realized
that Julie would now feel herself tragically linked to the Moffatts, and
how could he leave her? He piteously told himself that here, and now,
was his chance with her. As he bore himself now towards her, in this
hour of her grief for Warkworth, so, perhaps, would their future be.

Yet the claims of kindred were strong. He suffered much inward distress
as he thought of the father and son, and their old touching dependence
upon him. Chudleigh, as Jacob knew well, was himself incurably ill.
Could he long survive his poor boy?

And so that other thought, which Jacob spent so much ingenuity in
avoiding, rushed upon him unawares. The near, inevitable expectation of
the famous dukedom, which, in the case of almost any other man in
England, must at least have quickened the blood with a natural
excitement, produced in Delafield's mind a mere dull sense of
approaching torment. Perhaps there was something non-sane in his
repulsion, something that linked itself with his father's "queerness,"
or the bigotry and fanaticism of his grandmother, the Evangelical
Duchess, with her "swarm of parsons," as Sir Wilfrid remembered her. The
oddity, which had been violent or brutal in earlier generations, showed
itself in him, one might have said, in a radical transposition of
values, a singularity of criterion, which the ordinary robust Englishman
might very well dismiss with impatience as folly or cant.

Yet it was neither; and the feeling had, in truth, its own logic and
history. He had lived from his youth up among the pageants of