Well, she must recapture herself and remake her life.  As she sat there in the still Italian evening she thought of the old boatman, and those social and intellectual passions to which his burst of patriotism had recalled her thoughts.  Society, literature, friends, and the ambitions to which these lead—­let her go back to them and build her days afresh.  Dr. Meredith was coming.  In his talk and companionship she would once more dip and temper the tools of mind and taste.  No more vain self-arraignment, no more useless regrets.  She looked back with bitterness upon a moment of weakness when, in the first stage of convalescence, in mortal weariness and loneliness, she had slipped one evening into the Farm Street church and unburdened her heart in confession.  As she had told the Duchess, the Catholicism instilled into her youth by the Bruges nuns still laid upon her at times its ghostly and compelling hand.  Now in her renewed strength she was inclined to look upon it as an element of weakness and disintegration in her nature.  She resolved, in future, to free herself more entirely from a useless Aberglaube.

But Meredith was not the only visitor expected at the villa in the next few days.  She was already schooling herself to face the arrival of Jacob Delafield.

It was curious how the mere thought of Delafield produced an agitation, a shock of feeling, which seemed to spread through all the activities of being.  The faint, renascent glamour which had begun to attach to literature and social life disappeared.  She fell into a kind of brooding, the sombre restlessness of one who feels in the dark the recurrent presence of an attacking and pursuing power, and is in a tremulous uncertainty where or how to meet it.

The obscure tumult within her represented, in fact, a collision between the pagan and Christian conceptions of life.  In self-dependence, in personal pride, in her desire to refer all things to the arbitrament of reason, Julie, whatever her practice, was theoretically a stoic and a pagan.  But Delafield’s personality embodied another “must,” another “ought,” of a totally different kind.  And it was a “must” which, in a great crisis of her life, she also had been forced to obey.  There was the thought which stung and humiliated.  And the fact was irreparable; nor did she see how she was ever to escape from the strange, silent, penetrating relation it had established between her and the man who loved her and had saved her, against her will.

During her convalescence at Crowborough House, Delafield had been often admitted.  It would have been impossible to exclude him, unless she had confided the whole story of the Paris journey to the Duchess.  And whatever Evelyn might tremblingly guess, from Julie’s own mouth she knew nothing.  So Delafield had come and gone, bringing Lord Lackington’s last words, and the account of his funeral, or acting as intermediary in business matters between Julie and the Chantrey brothers.  Julie could not remember that she had ever asked him for these services.  They fell to him, as it were, by common consent, and she had been too weak to resist.