could without means pursue the life which he was living.  Suspense, anxiety, sordid calculation were ever twitching his sleeve, and would have his attention.  Was the claim a valid claim, and must it prevail?  If it prevailed, how was he to live; and where, and on what?  Would the Minister grant his suit for a place or a pension?  Should he prefer that suit, or might he still by one deep night and one great hand at hazard win back the thirty thousand guineas he had lost in five years?

Such questions, troubling him whether he would or no, and forcing themselves on his attention when they were least welcome, ruffled at last the outward composure on which as a man of fashion he plumed himself.  He would fall silent in Julia’s company, and turning his eyes from her, in unworthy forgetfulness, would trace patterns in the dust with his cane, or stare by the minute together at the quiet stream that moved sluggishly beneath them.

On these occasions she made no attempt to rouse him.  But when he again awoke to the world, to the coach passing in its cloud of dust, or the gaping urchin, or the clang of the distant dinner-bell, he would find her considering him with an enigmatical smile, that lay in the region between amusement and pity; her shapely chin resting on her hand, and the lace falling from the whitest wrist in the world.  One day the smile lasted so long, was so strange and dubious, and so full of a weird intelligence, that it chilled him; it crept to his bones, disconcerted him, and set him wondering.  The uneasy questions that had haunted him at the first, recurred.  Why was this girl so facile, who had seemed so proud, and whose full lips curved so naturally?  Was she really won, or was she with some hidden motive only playing with him?  The notion was not flattering to a fine gentleman’s vanity; and in any other case he would have given himself credit for conquest.  But he had discovered that this girl was not as other girls; and then there was that puzzling smile.  He had surprised it half a dozen times before.

‘What is it?’ he said abruptly, holding her eyes with his.  This time he was determined to clear up the matter.

‘What?’ she asked in apparent innocence.  But she coloured, and he saw that she understood.

‘What does your smile mean, Pulcherrima?’

‘Only—­that I was reading your thoughts, Sir George,’ she answered.  ’And they were not of me.’

‘Impossible!’ he said.  I vow, Julia—­’

‘Don’t vow,’ she answered quickly, ’or when you vow—­some other time—­I may not be able to believe you!  You were not thinking of me, Sir George, but of your home, and the avenue of which you told me, and the elms in which the rooks lived, and the river in which you used to fish.  You were wondering to whom they would go, and who would possess them, and who would be born in the room in which you were born, and who would die in the room in which your father died.’