On the green ledge which ran round the hollow were children tugging at a goat.  Opposite was a contadino’s house of gray stone.  A water-wheel turned beside it, and a stream, brought down from the hills, ran chattering past, a white and dancing thread of water.  Everything was very still and soft.  The children and the river made their voices heard; and there were nightingales singing in the woods below.  Otherwise all was quiet.  With a tranquil and stealthy joy the spring was taking possession.  Nay—­the Angelus!  It swung over the lake and rolled from village to village....

The tears were in Julie’s eyes.  Such beauty as this was apt now to crush and break her.  All her being was still sore, and this appeal of nature was sometimes more than she could bear.

Only a few short weeks since Warkworth had gone out of her life—­since Delafield at a stroke had saved her from ruin—­since Lord Lackington had passed away.

One letter had reached her from Warkworth, a wild and incoherent letter, written at night in a little room of a squalid hotel near the Gare de Sceaux.  Her telegram had reached him, and for him, as for her, all was over.

But the letter was by no means a mere cry of baffled passion.  There was in it a new note of moral anguish, as fresh and startling in her ear, coming from him, as the cry of passion itself.  In the language of religion, it was the utterance of a man “convicted of sin.”

“How long is it since that man gave me your telegram?  I was pacing up and down the departure platform, working myself into an agony of nervousness and anxiety as the time went by, wondering what on earth had happened to you, when the chef de gare came up:  ‘Monsieur attend une depeche?’ There were some stupid formalities—­at last I got it.  It seemed to me I had already guessed what it contained.

     “So it was Delafield who met you—­Delafield who turned you
     back?

“I saw him outside the hotel yesterday, and we exchanged a few words.  I have always disliked his long, pale face and his high and mighty ways—­at any rate, towards plain fellows, who don’t belong to the classes, like me.  Yesterday I was more than usually anxious to get rid of him.

     “So he guessed?

     “It can’t have been chance.  In some way he guessed.  And you
     have been torn from me.  My God!  If I could only reach him—­if
     I could fling his contempt in his face!  And yet—­

“I have been walking up and down this room all night.  The longing for you has been the sharpest suffering I suppose that I have ever known.  For I am not one of the many people who enjoy pain.  I have kept as free of it as I could.  This time it caught and gripped me.  Yet that isn’t all.  There has been something else.

“What strange, patched creatures we are!  Do you know, Julie, that by the