“I must hope, at any rate, that I shall see you again—­and mamma,” she said, smiling on him through her tears.

“I wonder what it will be like,” he replied, after a pause.  His tone and look implied a freakish, a whimsical curiosity, yet full of charm.  Then, motioning to her to come nearer, and speaking into her ear: 

“Your poor mother, Julie, was never happy—­never!  There must be laws, you see—­and churches—­and religious customs.  It’s because—­we’re made of such wretched stuff.  My wife, when she died—­made me promise to continue going to church—­and praying.  And—­without it—­I should have been a bad man.  Though I’ve had plenty of sceptical thoughts—­plenty.  Your poor parents rebelled—­against all that.  They suffered—­they suffered.  But you’ll make up—­you’re a noble woman—­you’ll make up.”

He laid his hand on her head.  She offered no reply; but through the inner mind there rushed the incidents, passions, revolts of the preceding days.

But for that strange chance of Delafield’s appearance in her path—­a chance no more intelligible to her now, after the pondering of several feverish hours, than it had been at the moment of her first suspicion—­where and what would she be now?  A dishonored woman, perhaps, with a life-secret to keep; cut off, as her mother had been, from the straight-living, law-abiding world.

The touch of the old man’s hand upon her hair roused in her a first recoil, a first shattering doubt of the impulse which had carried her to Paris.  Since Delafield left her in the early dawn she had been pouring out a broken, passionate heart in a letter to Warkworth.  No misgivings while she was writing it as to the all-sufficing legitimacy of love!

But here, in this cold neighborhood of the grave—­brought back to gaze in spirit; on her mother’s tragedy—­she shrank, she trembled.  Her proud intelligence denied the stain, and bade her hate and despise her rescuer.  And, meanwhile, things also inherited and inborn, the fruit of a remoter ancestry, rising from the dimmest and deepest caverns of personality, silenced the clamor of the naturalist mind.  One moment she felt herself seized with terror lest anything should break down the veil between her real self and this unsuspecting tenderness of the dying man; the next she rose in revolt against her own fear.  Was she to find herself, after all, a mere weak penitent—­meanly grateful to Jacob Delafield?  Her heart cried out to Warkworth in a protesting anguish.

So absorbed in thought was she that she did not notice how long the silence had lasted.

“He seems to be sleeping,” said a low voice beside her.

She looked up to see the doctor, with Lord Uredale.  Gently releasing herself, she kissed Lord Lackington’s forehead, and rose to her feet.

Suddenly the patient opened his eyes, and as he seemed to become aware of the figures beside him, he again lifted himself in bed, and a gleam most animated, most vivacious, passed over his features.