At the first words, almost, Julie had disengaged herself.  Pushing him from her with both hands, she listened to him in a dumb amazement.  The color first deserted her face, then returned in a flood.

“So you despise me?” she said, catching her breath.

“No.  I adore you.”

She fell upon a chair and hid her eyes.  He first knelt beside her, arguing and soothing; then he paced up and down before her, talking very fast and low, defending and developing the scheme, till it stood before them complete and tempting in all its details.

Julie did not look up, nor did she speak.  At last, Warkworth, full of tears, and stifled with his own emotions, threw open the window again in a craving for air and coolness.  A scent of fresh leaves and moistened earth floated up from the shrubbery beneath the window.  The scent, the branching trees, the wide, mild spaces of air brought relief.  He leaned out, bathing his brow in the night.  A tumult of voices seemed to be echoing through his mind, dominated by one which held the rest defiantly in check.

“Is she a mere girl, to be ‘led astray’?  A moment of happiness—­what harm?—­for either of us?”

Then he returned to Julie.

“Julie!” He touched her shoulder, trembling.  Had she banished him forever?  It seemed to him that in these minutes he had passed through an infinity of experience.  Was he not the nobler, the more truly man?  Let the moralists talk.

“Julie!” he repeated, in an anguish.

She raised her head, and he saw that she had been crying.  But there was in her face a light, a wildness, a yearning that reassured him.  She put her arm round him and pressed her cheek to his.  He divined that she, too, had lived and felt a thousand hours in one.  With a glow of ecstatic joy he began to talk to her again, her head resting on his shoulder, her slender hands crushed in his.

And Julie, meanwhile, was saying to herself, “Either I go to him, as he asks, or in a few minutes I must send him away—­forever.”

And then as she clung to him, so warm and near, her strength failed her.  Nothing in the world mattered to her at that moment but this handsome, curly head bowed upon her own, this voice that called her all the names of love, this transformation of the man’s earlier prudence, or ambition, or duplicity, into this eager tenderness, this anguish in separation....

“Listen, dear!” He whispered to her.  “All my business can be got through the day before you come.  I have two men to see.  A day will be ample.  I dine at the Embassy to-morrow night—­that is arranged; the day after I lunch with the Military Secretary; then—­a thousand regrets, but I must hurry on to meet some friends in Italy.  So I turn my back on Paris, and for two days I belong to Julie—­and she to me.  Say yes, Julie—­my Julie!”

He bent over her, his hands framing her face.

“Say yes,” he urged, “and put off for both of us that word—­alone!”