mage, mingled with
her own.

Once she found herself sitting at the edge of a meadow, environed by the
heavy scents of flowers. Some apple-trees with whitened trunks rose
between her and the lake a thousand feet below. The walls of Chillon,
the houses of Montreux, caught the light; opposite, the deep forests of
Bouveret and St. Gingolphe lay black upon the lake; above them rode the
moon. And to the east the high Alps, their pure lines a little effaced
and withdrawn, as when a light veil hangs over a sanctuary.

Julie looked out upon a vast freedom of space, and by a natural
connection she seemed to be also surveying her own world of life and
feeling, her past and her future. She thought of her childhood and her
parents, of her harsh, combative youth, of the years with Lady Henry, of
Warkworth, of her husband, and the life into which his strong hand had
so suddenly and rashly drawn her. Her thoughts took none of the
religious paths so familiar to his. And yet her reverie was so far
religious that her mind seemed to herself to be quivering under the
onset of affections, emotions, awes, till now unknown, and that, looking
back, she was conscious of a groping sense of significance, of purpose,
in all that had befallen her. Yet to this sense she could put no words.
Only, in the end, through the constant action of her visualizing
imagination, it connected itself with Delafield's face, and with the
memory of many of his recent acts and sayings.

It was one of those hours which determine the history of a man or woman.
And the august Alpine beauty entered in, so that Julie, in this sad and
thrilling act of self-probing, felt herself in the presence of powers
and dominations divine.

Her face, stained with tears, took gradually some of the calm, the
loftiness of the night. Yet the close-shut, brooding mouth would slip
sometimes into a smile exquisitely soft and gentle, as though the heart
remembered something which seemed to the intelligence at once folly and
sweetness.

What was going on within her was, to her own consciousness, a strange
thing. It appeared to her as a kind of simplification, a return to
childhood; or, rather, was it the emergence in the grown mind, tired
with the clamor of its own egotistical or passionate life, of some
instincts, natural to the child, which she, nevertheless, as a child had
never known; instincts of trust, of self-abandonment, steeped, perhaps,
in those tears which are themselves only ano