e maddened him. He then was to be for her, in the future, the
mere symbol of the vulgarer pleasures and opportunities, while Warkworth
held her heart?

Nay!

He stood still, strengthening in himself the glad and sufficient answer.
She had refused him twice--knowing all his circumstances. At this moment
he adored her doubly for those old rebuffs.

* * * * *

Within twenty-four hours Delafield had received a telegram from his
friend at Zanzibar. For the most part it recapitulated the news already
sent to Cairo, and thence transmitted to the English papers. But it
added the information that Warkworth had been buried in the neighborhood
of a certain village on the caravan route to Mokembe, and that special
pains had been taken to mark the spot. And the message concluded: "Fine
fellow. Hard luck. Everybody awfully sorry here."

These words brought Delafield a sudden look of passionate gratitude from
Julie's dark and sunken eyes. She rested her face against his sleeve and
pressed his hand.

Lady Blanche also wept over the telegram, exclaiming that she had
always believed in Henry Warkworth, and now, perhaps, those busybodies
who at Simla had been pleased to concern themselves with her affairs and
Aileen's would see cause to be ashamed of themselves.

To Delafield's discomfort, indeed, she poured out upon him a stream of
confidences he would have gladly avoided. He had brought the telegram to
her sitting-room. In the room adjoining it was Aileen, still, according
to her mother's account, very ill, and almost speechless. Under the
shadow of such a tragedy it seemed to him amazing that a mother could
find words in which to tell her daughter's story to a comparative
stranger. Lady Blanche appeared to him an ill-balanced and foolish
woman; a prey, on the one hand, to various obscure jealousies and
antagonisms, and on the other to a romantic and sentimental temper
which, once roused, gloried in despising "the world," by which she
generally meant a very ordinary degree of prudence.

She was in chronic disagreement, it seemed, with her daughter's
guardians, and had been so from the first moment of her widowhood, the
truth being that she was jealous of their legal powers over Aileen's
fortune and destiny, and determined, notwithstanding, to have her own
way with her own child. The wilfulness and caprice of the father, which
had taken such strange and desperate forms in Rose Delaney, appeared
sh