e came to Julie's lips, but it seemed useless to say them,
and once more, but in a totally new way, she was "afraid" of the man
beside her.

* * * * *

She left him shortly after, by his own wish.

"I will lie down, and you must rest," he said, with decision.

So she bathed and dressed, and presently she allowed the kind,
fair-haired Susan to give her food, and pour out her own history of the
death-week which she and Jacob had passed through. But in all that was
said, Julie noticed that Susan spoke of her brother very little, and of
his inheritance and present position not at all. And once or twice she
noticed a wondering or meditative expression in the girl's charming eyes
as they rested on herself, and realized that the sense of mystery, of
hushed expectancy, was not confined to her own mind.

When Susan left her at nine o'clock, it was to give a number of
necessary orders in the house. The inquest was to be held in the
morning, and the whole day would be filled with arrangements for the
double funeral. The house would be thronged with officials of all sorts.
"Poor Jacob!" said the sister, sighing, as she went away.

But the tragic tumult had not yet begun. The house was still quiet, and
Julie was for the first time alone.

She drew up the blinds, and stood gazing out upon the park, now flooded
with light; at the famous Italian garden beneath the windows, with its
fountains and statues; at the wide lake which filled the middle
distance; and the hills beyond it, with the plantations and avenues
which showed the extension of the park as far as the eye could see.

Julie knew very well what it all implied. Her years with Lady Henry, in
connection with her own hidden sense of birth and family, had shown her
with sufficient plainness the conditions under which the English noble
lives. She _was_ actually, at that moment, Duchess of Chudleigh; her
strong intelligence faced and appreciated the fact; the social scope and
power implied in those three words were all the more vivid to her
imagination because of her history and up-bringing. She had not grown to
maturity _inside_, like Delafield, but as an exile from a life which was
yet naturally hers--an exile, full, sometimes, of envy, and the
passions of envy.

It had no terrors for her--quite the contrary--this high social state.
Rather, there were moments when her whole nature reached out to it, in a
proud and confident ambition. Nor ha