and dusted.  In less than a week she knew every glass and cup in Cousin Mary Leicester’s well-filled china cupboard, and she and Therese between them kept the two sitting-rooms spotless.  She who had at once made friends and tools of Lady Henry’s servants, disdained, so it appeared, to be served beyond what was absolutely necessary in her own house.  A charwoman, indeed, came in the morning for the roughest work, but by ten o’clock she was gone, and Julie, Madame Bornier, and the child remained in undisputed possession.  Little, flat-nosed, silent Madame Bornier bought and brought in all they ate.  She denounced the ways, the viands, the brigand’s prices of English fournisseurs, but it seemed to Julie, all the same, that she handled them with a Napoleonic success.  She bought as the French poor buy, so far as the West End would let her, and Julie had soon perceived that their expenditure, even in this heart of Mayfair, would be incredibly small.  Whereby she felt herself more and more mistress of her fate.  By her own unaided hands would she provide for herself and her household.  Each year there should be a little margin, and she would owe no man anything.  After six months, if she could not afford to pay the Duke a fair rent for his house—­always supposing he allowed her to remain in it—­she would go elsewhere.

As she reached the hall, clad in an old serge dress, which was a survival from Bruges days, Therese ran up to her with the letters.

Julie looked through them, turned and went back to her room.  She had expected the letter which lay on the top, and she must brace herself to read it.

It began abruptly: 

“You will hardly wonder that I should write at once to ask if you have no explanation to give me of your manner of this afternoon.  Again and again I go over what happened, but no light comes.  It was as though you had wiped out all the six months of our friendship; as though I had become for you once more the merest acquaintance.  It is impossible that I can have been mistaken.  You meant to make me—­and others?—­clearly understand—­what?  That I no longer deserved your kindness—­that you had broken altogether with the man on whom you had so foolishly bestowed it?

“My friend, what have I done?  How have I sinned?  Did that sour lady, who asked me questions she had small business to ask, tell you tales that have set your heart against me?  But what have incidents and events that happened, or may have happened, in India, got to do with our friendship, which grew up for definite reasons and has come to mean so much—­has it not?—­to both of us?  I am not a model person, Heaven knows!—­very far from it.  There are scores of things in my life to be ashamed of.  And please remember that last year I had never seen you; if I had, much might have gone differently.

“But how can I defend myself?  I owe you so much.  Ought not that, of itself,