The paper had dropped to the floor, but the child still pointed to it, gasping.

“Mother—­mother!”

Some intuition woke in Julie.  She stood dead-white and dumb, while Lady Blanche threw herself on her daughter.

“Aileen, darling, what is it?”

The girl, in her agony, threw her arms frantically round her mother, and dragged herself to her feet.  She stood tottering, her hand over her eyes.

“He’s dead, mother!  He’s—­dead!”

The last word sank into a sound more horrible even than the first cry.  Then she swayed out of her mother’s arms.  It was Julie who caught her, who laid her once more on the deck-chair—­a broken, shrunken form, in whom all the threads and connections of life had suddenly, as it were, fallen to ruin.  Lady Blanche hung over her, pushing Julie away, gathering the unconscious girl madly in her arms.  Delafield rushed for water-and-brandy.  Julie snatched the paper and looked at the telegrams.

High up in the first column was the one she sought.

“CAIRO, June 12.—­Great regret is felt here at the sudden and tragic news of Major Warkworth’s death from fever, which seems to have occurred at a spot some three weeks’ distance from the coast, on or about May 25.  Letters from the officer who has succeeded him in the command of the Mokembe expedition have now reached Denga.  A fortnight after leaving the coast Major Warkworth was attacked with fever; he made a brave struggle against it, but it was of a deadly type, and in less than a week he succumbed.  The messenger brought also his private papers and diaries, which have been forwarded to his representatives in England.  Major Warkworth was a most promising and able officer, and his loss will be keenly felt.”

Julie fell on her knees beside her swooning cousin.  Lady Blanche, meanwhile, was loosening her daughter’s dress, chafing her icy hands, or moaning over her in a delirium of terror.

“My darling—­my darling!  Oh, my God!  Why did I allow it?  Why did I ever let him come near her?  It was my fault—­my fault!  And it’s killed her!”

And clinging to her child’s irresponsive hands, she looked down upon her in a convulsion of grief, which included not a shadow of regret, not a gleam of pity for anything or any one else in the world but this bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh, which lay stricken there.

But Julie’s mind had ceased to be conscious of the tragedy beside her.  It had passed for the second time into the grasp of an illusion which possessed itself of the whole being and all its perceptive powers.  Before her wide, terror-stricken gaze there rose once more the same piteous vision which had tortured her in the crisis of her love for Warkworth.  Against the eternal snows which close in the lake the phantom hovered in a ghastly relief—­emaciated, with matted hair, and purpled cheeks, and eyes—­not to be borne!—­expressing the dumb anger of a man, still young, who parts unwillingly from life in a last lonely spasm of uncomforted pain.