But it was at La Verna, the mountain height overshadowed by the memories of St. Francis, that she seemed to have come nearest to the ascetic and mystical tendency in Delafield.  He went about the mountain-paths a transformed being, like one long spiritually athirst who has found the springs and sources of life.  Julie felt a secret terror.  Her impression was much the same as Meredith’s—­as of “something wearing through” to the light of day.  Looking back she saw that this temperament, now so plain to view, had been always there; but in the young and capable agent of the Chudleigh property, in the Duchess’s cousin, or Lady Henry’s nephew, it had passed for the most part unsuspected.  How remarkably it had developed!—­whither would it carry them both in the future?  When thinking about it, she was apt to find herself seized with a sudden craving for Mayfair, “little dinners,” and good talk.

“What a pity you weren’t born a Catholic!—­you might have been a religious,” she said to him one night at La Verna, when he had been reading her some of the Fioretti with occasional comments of his own.

But he had shaken his head with a smile.

“You see, I have no creed—­or next to none.”

The answer startled her.  And in the depths of his blue eyes there seemed to her to be hovering a swarm of thoughts that would not let themselves loose in her presence, but were none the less the true companions of his mind.  She saw herself a moment as Elsa, and her husband as a modern Lohengrin, coming spiritually she knew not whence, bound on some quest mysterious and unthinkable.

“What will you do,” she said, suddenly, “when the dukedom comes to you?”

Delafield’s aspect darkened in an instant.  If he could have shown anger to her, anger there would have been.

“That is a subject I never think of or discuss, if I can help it,” he said, abruptly; and, rising to his feet, he pointed out that the sun was declining fast towards the plain of the Casentino, and they were far from their hotel.

“Inhuman!—­unreasonable!” was the cry of the critical sense in her as she followed him in silence.

* * * * *

Innumerable memories of this kind beat on Julie’s mind as she sat dreamily on her bench among the Swiss meadows.  How natural that in the end they should sweep her by reaction into imaginations wholly indifferent—­of a drum-and-trumpet history, in the actual fighting world.

...  Far, far in the African desert she followed the march of Warkworth’s little troop.

Ah, the blinding light—­the African scrub and sand—­the long, single line—­the native porters with their loads—­the handful of English officers with that slender figure at their head—­the endless, waterless path with its palms and mangoes and mimosas—­the scene rushed upon the inward eye and held it.  She felt the heat, the thirst, the weariness of bone and brain—­all the spell and mystery of the unmapped, unconquered land.