“Brougham’s not asked,” he said, with a little chuckle of amusement.  “Isn’t it a joke?”

The two men beside him looked at each other.  Lord Uredale approached the bed.

“Not asked to what, father?” he said, gently.

“Why, to the Queen’s fancy ball, of course,” said Lord Lackington, still smiling.  “Such a to-do!  All the elderly sticks practising minuets for their lives!”

A voluble flow of talk followed—­hardly intelligible.  The words “Melbourne” and “Lady Holland” emerged—­the fragment, apparently, of a dispute with the latter, in which “Allen” intervened—­the names of “Palmerston” and “that dear chap, Villiers.”

Lord Uredale sighed.  The young doctor looked at him interrogatively.

“He is thinking of his old friends,” said the son.  “That was the Queen’s ball, I imagine, of ’42.  I have often heard him describe my mother’s dress.”

But while he was speaking the fitful energy died away.  The old man ceased to talk; his eyelids fell.  But the smile still lingered about his mouth, and as he settled himself on his pillows, like one who rests, the spectators were struck by the urbane and distinguished beauty of his aspect.  The purple flush had died again into mortal pallor.  Illness had masked or refined the weakness of mouth and chin; the beautiful head and countenance, with their characteristic notes of youth, impetuosity, a kind of gay detachment, had never been more beautiful.

The young doctor looked stealthily from the recumbent figure to the tall and slender woman standing absorbed and grief-stricken beside the bed.  The likeness was as evident to him as it had been, in the winter, to Sir Wilfrid Bury.

* * * * *

As he was escorting her down-stairs, Lord Uredale said to his companion, “Foster thinks he may still live twenty-four hours.”

“If he asks for me again,” said Julie, now shrouded once more behind a thick, black veil, “you will send?”

He gravely assented.

“It is a great pity,” he said, with a certain stiffness—­did it unconsciously mark the difference between her and his legitimate kindred?—­“that my sister Lady Blanche and her daughter cannot be with us.”

“They are in Italy?”

“At Florence.  My niece has had an attack of diphtheria.  She could neither travel nor could her mother leave her.”

Then pausing in the hall, he added in a low voice, and with some embarrassment: 

“My father has told you, I believe, of the addition he has made to his will?”

Julie drew back.

“I neither asked for it nor desired it,” she said, in her coldest and clearest voice.

“That I quite understand,” said Lord Uredale.  “But—­you cannot hurt him by refusing.”

She hesitated.

“No.  But afterwards—­I must be free to follow my own judgment.”

“We cannot take what does not belong to us,” he said, with some sharpness.  “My brother and I are named as your trustees.  Believe me, we will do our best.”