n her grief for
Warkworth, her intolerable compassion for his fate. In sheer dread lest
the girl should find her out and hate her, she lost insensibly the first
poignancy of sorrow.

These secrets of feeling left her constantly pale and silent. Yet her
grace had never been more evident. All the inmates of the little
_pension_, the landlord's family, the servants, the visitors, as the
days passed, felt the romance and thrill of her presence. Lady Blanche
evoked impatience of ennui. She was inconsiderate; she was meddlesome;
she soon ceased even to be pathetic. But for Julie every foot ran, every
eye smiled.

Then, when the day was over, Delafield's opportunity began. Julie could
not sleep. He gradually established the right to read with her and talk
with her. It was a relation very singular, and very intimate. She would
admit him at his knock, and he would find her on her sofa, very sad,
often in tears, her black hair loose upon her shoulders. Outwardly there
was often much ceremony, even distance between them; inwardly, each was
exploring the other, and Julie's attitude towards Delafield was becoming
more uncertain, more touched with emotion.

What was, perhaps, most noticeable in it was a new timidity, a touch of
anxious respect towards him. In the old days, what with her literary
cultivation and her social success, she had always been the flattered
and admired one of their little group. Delafield felt himself clumsy and
tongue-tied beside her. It was a superiority on her part very natural
and never ungraceful, and it was his chief delight to bring it forward,
to insist upon it, to take it for granted.

But the relation between them had silently shifted.

"You _judge_--you are always judging," she had said once, impatiently,
to Delafield. And now it was round these judgments, these inward
verdicts of his, on life or character, that she was perpetually
hovering. She was infinitely curious about them. She would wrench them
from him, and then would often shiver away from him in resentment.

He, meanwhile, as he advanced further in the knowledge of her strange
nature, was more and more bewildered by her--her perversities and
caprices, her brilliancies and powers, her utter lack of any standard or
scheme of life. She had been for a long time, as it seemed to him, the
creature of her exquisite social instincts--then the creature of
passion. But what a woman through it all, and how adorable, with those
poetic gestures