“Nothing of that is news to me.  Did you think it was?”

And moving to the tea-table, she began to make provision for a fresh supply of tea.

Both words and manner astounded him.  He, too, rose and followed her.

“How did you first guess?” he said, abruptly.

“Some gossip reached me.”  She looked up with a smile.  “That’s what generally happens, isn’t it?”

“There are no secrets nowadays,” he said, sorely.  “And then, there was Miss Lawrence?”

“Yes, there was Miss Lawrence.”

“Did you think badly of me?”

“Why should I?  I understand Aileen is very pretty, and—­”

“And will have a large fortune.  You understand that?” he said, trying to carry it off lightly.

“The fact is well known, isn’t it?”

He sat down, twisting his hat between his hands.  Then with an exclamation he dashed it on the floor, and, rising, he bent over Julie, his hands in his pockets.

“Julie,” he said, in a voice that shook her, “don’t, for God’s sake, give me up!  I have behaved abominably, but don’t take your friendship from me.  I shall soon be gone.  Our lives will go different ways.  That was settled—­alack!—­before we met.  I am honorably bound to that poor child.  She cares for me, and I can’t get loose.  But these last months have been happy, haven’t they?  There are just three weeks left.  At present the strongest feeling in my heart is—­” He paused for his word, and he saw that she was looking through the window to the trees of the garden, and that, still as she was, her lip quivered.

“What shall I say?” he resumed, with emotion.  “It seems to me our case stands all by itself, alone in the world.  We have three weeks—­give them to me.  Don’t let’s play at cross purposes any more.  I want to be sincere—­I want to hide nothing from you in these days.  Let us throw aside convention and trust each other, as friends may, so that when I go we may say to each other, ’Well, it was worth the pain.  These have been days of gold—­we shall get no better if we live to be a hundred.’”

She turned her face to him in a tremulous amazement and there were tears on her cheek.  Never had his aspect been so winning.  What he proposed was, in truth, a mean thing; all the same, he proposed it nobly.

It was in vain that something whispered in her ear:  “This girl to whom he describes himself as ‘honorably bound’ has a fortune of half a million.  He is determined to have both her money and my heart.”  Another inward voice, tragically generous, dashed down the thought, and, at the moment, rightly; for as he stood over her, breathless and imperious, to his own joy, to his own exaltation, Warkworth was conscious of a new sincerity flowing in a tempestuous and stormy current through all the veins of being.

With a sombre passion which already marked an epoch in their relation, and contained within itself the elements of new and unforeseen developments, she gazed silently into his face.  Then, leaning back in her chair, she once more held out to him both her hands.