For a moment she hesitated.  Then she ran after the owner of the letter.

“You dropped this on the road.”

The girl turned hastily.

“Thank you very much.  I am sorry to have given you the trouble—­”

Then she paused, arrested evidently by the manner in which Julie stood regarding her.

“Did—­did you wish to speak to me?” she said, uncertainly.

“You are Miss Moffatt?”

“Yes.  That is my name.  But, excuse me.  I am afraid I don’t remember you.”  The words were spoken with a charming sweetness and timidity.

“I am Mrs. Delafield.”

The girl started violently.

“Are you?  I—­I beg your pardon!”

She stood in a flushed bewilderment, staring at the lady who had addressed her, a troubled consciousness possessing itself of her face and manner more and more plainly with every moment.

Julie asked herself, hurriedly:  “How much does she know?  What has she heard?” But aloud she gently said:  “I thought you must have heard of me.  Lord Uredale told me he had written—­his father wished it—­to Lady Blanche.  Your mother and mine were sisters.”

The girl shyly withdrew her eyes.

“Yes, mother told me.”

There was a moment’s silence.  The mingled fear and recklessness which had accompanied Julie’s action disappeared from her mind.  In the girl’s manner there was neither jealousy nor hatred, only a young shrinking and reserve.

“May I walk with you a little?”

“Please do.  Are you staying at Montreux?”

“No; we are at Charnex—­and you?”

“We came up two days ago to a little pension at Brent.  I wanted to be among the fields, now the narcissuses are out.  If it were warm weather we should stay, but mother is afraid of the cold for me.  I have been ill.”

“I heard that,” said Julie, in a voice gravely kind and winning.  “That was why your mother could not come home.”

The girl’s eyes suddenly filled with tears.

“No; poor mother!  I wanted her to go—­we had a good nurse—­but she would not leave me, though she was devoted to my grandfather.  She—­”

“She is always anxious about you?”

“Yes.  My health has been a trouble lately, and since father died—­”

“She has only you.”

They walked on a few paces in silence.  Then the girl looked up eagerly.

“You saw grandfather at the last?  Do tell me about it, please.  My uncles write so little.”

Julie obeyed with difficulty.  She had not realized how hard it would be for her to talk of Lord Lackington.  But she described the old man’s gallant dying as best she could; while Aileen Moffatt listened with that manner at once timid and rich in feeling which seemed to be her characteristic.

As they neared the top of the hill where the road begins to incline towards Charnex, Julie noticed signs of fatigue in her companion.