Resolutely, in this last meeting with Julie, he gave these emotions play.  He possessed himself of her cold hands as she put her desolate question—­“And then?”—­and kissed them fervently.

“Julie, if you and I had met a year ago, what happened in India would never have happened.  You know that!”

“Do I?  But it only hurts me to think it away like that.  There it is—­it has happened.”

She turned upon him suddenly.

“Have you any picture of her?”

He hesitated.

“Yes,” he said, at last.

“Have you got it here?”

“Why do you ask, dear one?  This one evening is ours.”

And again he tried to draw her to him.  But she persisted.

“I feel sure you have it.  Show it me.”

“Julie, you and you only are in my thoughts!”

“Then do what I ask.”  She bent to him with a wild, entreating air; her lips almost touched his cheek.  Unwillingly he drew out a letter-case from his breast-pocket, and took from it a little photograph which he handed to her.

She looked at it with eager eyes.  A face framed, as it were, out of snow and fire lay in her hand, a thing most delicate, most frail, yet steeped in feeling and significance—­a child’s face with its soft curls of brown hair, and the upper lip raised above the white, small teeth, as though in a young wonder; yet behind its sweetness, what suggestions of a poetic or tragic sensibility!  The slender neck carried the little head with girlish dignity; the clear, timid eyes seemed at once to shrink from and trust the spectator.

Julie returned the little picture, and hid her face with her hands.  Warkworth watched her uncomfortably, and at last drew her hands away.

“What are you thinking of?” he said, almost with violence.  “Don’t shut me out!”

“I am not jealous now,” she said, looking at him piteously.  “I don’t hate her.  And if she knew all—­she couldn’t—­hate me.”

“No one could hate her.  She is an angel.  But she is not my Julie!” he said, vehemently, and he thrust the little picture into his pocket again.

“Tell me,” she said, after a pause, laying her hand on his knee, “when did you begin to think of me—­differently?  All the winter, when we used to meet, you never—­you never loved me then?”

“How, placed as I was, could I let myself think of love?  I only knew that I wanted to see you, to talk to you, to write to you—­that the day when we did not meet was a lost day.  Don’t be so proud!” He tried to laugh at her.  “You didn’t think of me in any special way, either.  You were much too busy making bishops, or judges, or academicians.  Oh, Julie, I was so afraid of you in those early days!”