His low voice sank into her heart.  He waited, till his strained sense caught the murmured words which conveyed to him the madness and the astonishment of victory.

* * * * *

Leonie had shut up the house, in a grim silence, and had taken her way up-stairs to bed.

Julie, too, was in her room.  She sat on the edge of her bed, her head drooped, her hands clasped before her absently, like Hope still listening for the last sounds of the harp of life.  The candle beside her showed her, in the big mirror opposite, her grace, the white confusion of her dress.

She had expected reaction, but it did not come.  She was still borne on a warm tide of will and energy.  All that she was about to do seemed to her still perfectly natural and right.  Petty scruples, conventional hesitations, the refusal of life’s great moments—­these are what are wrong, these are what disgrace!

Romance beckoned to her, and many a secret tendency towards the lawless paths of conduct, infused into her by the associations and affections of her childhood.  The horror naturalis which protects the great majority of women from the wilder ways of passion was in her weakened or dormant.  She was the illegitimate child of a mother who had defied law for love, and of that fact she had been conscious all her life.

A sharp contempt, indeed, arose within her for the interpretation that the common mind would be sure to place upon her action.

“What matter!  I am my own mistress—­responsible to no one.  I choose for myself—­I dare for myself!”

And when at last she rose, first loosening and then twisting the black masses of her hair, it seemed to her that the form in the glass was that of another woman, treading another earth.  She trampled cowardice under foot; she freed herself from—­“was uns alle baendigt, das Gemeine!”

Then as she stood before the oval mirror in a classical frame, which adorned the mantel-piece of what had once been Lady Mary Leicester’s room, her eye was vaguely caught by the little family pictures and texts which hung on either side of it.  Lady Mary and her sister as children, their plain faces emerging timidly from their white, high-waisted frocks; Lady ’Mary’s mother, an old lady in a white coif and kerchief, wearing a look austerely kind; on the other side a clergyman, perhaps the brother of the old lady, with a similar type of face, though gentler—­a face nourished on the Christian Year; and above and below them two or three card-board texts, carefully illuminated by Lady Mary Leicester herself: 

“Thou, Lord, knowest my down-sitting and my uprising.”

“Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”

“Fear not, little flock.  It is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

* * * * *

Julie observed these fragments, absently at first, then with repulsion.  This Anglican pietism, so well fed, so narrowly sheltered, which measured the universe with its foot-rule, seemed to her quasi-Catholic eye merely fatuous and hypocritical.  It is not by such forces, she thought, that the true world of men and women is governed.