“You will sleep a little?” he said, looking down upon her.

“I will try, mon ami.”

“If you don’t sleep, and would like me to read to you, call me.  I am in the next room.”

She thanked him faintly, and he went away.  At the door he paused and came back again.

“To-night”—­he hesitated—­“while the doctors were here, I ran down to Montreux by the short path and telegraphed.  The consul at Zanzibar is an old friend of mine.  I asked him for more particulars at once, by wire.  But the letters can’t be here for a fortnight.”

“I know.  You’re very, very good.”

* * * * *

Hour after hour Delafield sat motionless in his room, till “high in the Valais depths profound” he “saw the morning break.”

There was a little balcony at his command, and as he noiselessly stepped out upon it, between three and four o’clock, he felt himself the solitary comrade of the mist-veiled lake, of those high, rosy mountains on the eastern verge, the first throne and harbor of the light—­of the lower forest-covered hills that “took the morning,” one by one, in a glorious and golden succession.  All was fresh, austere, and vast—­the spaces of the lake, the distant hollows of high glaciers filled with purple shadow, the precipices of the Rochers de Naye, where the new snow was sparkling in the sun, the cool wind that blew towards him from the gates of Italy, down the winding recesses of that superb valley which has been a thoroughfare of nations from the beginning of time.

Not a boat on the wide reaches of the lake; not a voice or other sound of human toil, either from the vineyards below or the meadows above.  Meanwhile some instinct, perhaps also some faint movements in her room, told him that Julie was no less wakeful than himself.  And was not that a low voice in the room above him—­the trained voice and footsteps of a nurse?  Ah, poor little heiress, she, too, watched with sorrow!

A curious feeling of shame, of self-depreciation crept into his heart.  Surely he himself of late had been lying down with fear and rising up with bitterness?  Never a day had passed since they had reached Switzerland but he, a man of strong natural passions, had bade himself face the probable truth that, by a kind of violence, he had married a woman who would never love him—­had taken irrevocably a false step, only too likely to be fatal to himself, intolerable to her.

Nevertheless, steeped as he had been in sadness, in foreboding, and, during this by-gone night, in passionate envy of the dead yet beloved Warkworth, he had never been altogether unhappy.  That mysterious It—­that other divine self of the mystic—­God—­the enwrapping, sheltering force—­had been with him always.  It was with him now—­it spoke from the mysterious color and light of the dawn.

How, then, could he ever equal Julie in experience, in the true and poignant feeling of any grief whatever?  His mind was in a strange, double state.  It was like one who feels himself unfairly protected by a magic armor; he would almost throw it aside in a remorseful eagerness to be with his brethren, and as his brethren, in the sore weakness and darkness of the human combat; and then he thinks of the hand that gave the shield, and his heart melts in awe.