As she went up-stairs to her little room her heart reproached her.  In their interview the old man had shown great sweetness of feeling, a delicate and remorseful tenderness, hardly to have been looked for in a being so fantastic and self-willed.  The shock of their conversation had deepened the lines in a face upon which age had at last begun to make those marks which are not another beauty, but the end of beauty.  When she had opened the door for him in the dusk, Julie had longed, indeed, to go with him and soothe his solitary evening.  His unmarried son, William, lived with him intermittently; but his wife was dead.  Lady Blanche seldom came to town, and, for the most part, he lived alone in the fine house in St. James’s Square, of which she had heard her mother talk.

He liked her—­had liked her from the first.  How natural that she should tend and brighten his old age—­how natural, and how impossible!  He was not the man to brave the difficulties and discomforts inseparable from the sudden appearance of an illegitimate granddaughter in his household, and if he had been, Julie, in her fierce, new-born independence, would have shrunk from such a step.  But she had been drawn to him; her heart had yearned to her kindred.

No; neither love nor kindred were for her.  As she entered the little, bare room over the doorway, which she had begun to fill with books and papers, and all the signs of the literary trade, she miserably bid herself be content with what was easily and certainly within her grasp.  The world was pleased to say that she had a remarkable social talent.  Let her give her mind to the fight with Lady Henry, and prove whether, after all, the salon could not be acclimatized on English soil.  She had the literary instinct and aptitude, and she must earn money.  She looked at her half-written article, and sighed to her books to save her.

That evening Therese, who adored her, watched her with a wistful and stealthy affection.  Her idol was strangely sad and pale.  But she asked no questions.  All she could do was to hover about “mademoiselle” with soft, flattering services, till mademoiselle went to bed, and then to lie awake herself, quietly waiting till all sounds in the room opposite had died away, and she might comfort her dumb and timid devotion with the hope that Julie slept.

Sleep, however, or no sleep, Julie was up early next day.  Before the post arrived she was already dressed, and on the point of descending to the morning coffee, which, in the old, frugal, Bruges fashion, she and Leonie and the child took in the kitchen together.  Lady Henry’s opinion of her as a soft and luxurious person dependent on dainty living was, in truth, absurdly far from the mark.  After those years of rich food and many servants in Lady Henry’s household, she had resumed the penurious Belgian ways at once, without effort—­indeed, with alacrity.  In the morning she helped Leonie and Therese with the housework.  Her quick fingers washed and rubbed