simple and austere.

XXIV

"You have had a disquieting letter?"

The voice was Julie's. Delafield was standing, apparently in thought, at
the farther corner of the little, raised terrace of the hotel. She
approached him with an affectionate anxiety, of which he was instantly
conscious.

"I am afraid I may have to leave you to-night," he said, turning towards
her, and holding out the letter in his hand.

It contained a few agitated lines from the Duke of Chudleigh.

"They tell me my lad can't get over this. He's made a gallant fight, but
this beats us. A week or two--no more. Ask Mrs. Delafield to let you
come. She will, I know. She wrote to me very kindly. Mervyn keeps
talking of you. You'd come, if you heard him. It's ghastly--the cruelty
of it all. Whether I can live without him, that's the point."

"You'll go, of course?" said Julie, returning it.

"To-night, if you allow it."

"Of course. You ought."

"I hate leaving you alone, with this trouble on your hands," said Jacob,
in some agitation. "What are your plans?"

"I could follow you next week. Aileen comes down to-day. And I should
like to wait here for the mail."

"In five days, about, it should be here," said Delafield.

There was a silence. She dropped into a chair beside the balustrade of
the terrace, which was wreathed in wistaria, and looked out upon the
vast landscape of the lake. His thought was, "How can the mail matter to
her? She cannot suppose that he had written--"

Aloud he said, in some embarrassment, "You expect letters yourself?"

"I expect nothing," she said, after a pause. "But Aileen is living on
the chance of letters."

"There may be nothing for her--except, indeed, her letters to him--poor
child!"

"She knows that. But the hope keeps her alive."

"And you?" thought Delafield, with an inward groan, as he looked down
upon her pale profile. He had a moment's hateful vision of himself as
the elder brother in the parable. Was Julie's mind to be the home of an
eternal antithesis between the living husband and the dead lover--in
which the latter had forever the _beau role_?

Then, impatiently, Jacob wrenched himself from mean thoughts. It was as
though he bared his head remorse-fully before the dead man.

"I will go to the Foreign Office," he said, in her ear, "as I pass
through town. They will have letters. All the information I can get you
shall have at once."

"Thank you, _mon ami_", she said, almost inaudibly.

T