“Friend of my soul and of the world, make me thy tool—­thy instrument!  Thou art Love!  Speak through me!  Draw her heart to mine.”

At last, knowing that there was no sleep in him, and realizing that he had brooded enough, he made his way out of the hotel and up through the fresh and dew-drenched meadows, where the haymakers were just appearing, to the Les Avants stream.  A plunge into one of its cool basins retempered the whole man.  He walked back through the scented field-paths, resolutely restraining his mind from the thoughts of the night, hammering out, indeed, in his head a scheme for the establishment of small holdings on certain derelict land in Wiltshire belonging to his cousin.

As he was descending on Charnex, he met the postman and took his letters.  One among them, from the Duke of Chudleigh, contained a most lamentable account of Lord Elmira.  The father and son had returned to England, and an angry, inclement May had brought a touch of pneumonia to add to all the lad’s other woes.  In itself it was not much—­was, indeed, passing away.  “But it has used up most of his strength,” said the Duke, “and you know whether he had any to waste.  Don’t forget him.  He constantly thinks and talks of you.”

Delafield restlessly wondered when he could get home.  But he realized that Julie would now feel herself tragically linked to the Moffatts, and how could he leave her?  He piteously told himself that here, and now, was his chance with her.  As he bore himself now towards her, in this hour of her grief for Warkworth, so, perhaps, would their future be.

Yet the claims of kindred were strong.  He suffered much inward distress as he thought of the father and son, and their old touching dependence upon him.  Chudleigh, as Jacob knew well, was himself incurably ill.  Could he long survive his poor boy?

And so that other thought, which Jacob spent so much ingenuity in avoiding, rushed upon him unawares.  The near, inevitable expectation of the famous dukedom, which, in the case of almost any other man in England, must at least have quickened the blood with a natural excitement, produced in Delafield’s mind a mere dull sense of approaching torment.  Perhaps there was something non-sane in his repulsion, something that linked itself with his father’s “queerness,” or the bigotry and fanaticism of his grandmother, the Evangelical Duchess, with her “swarm of parsons,” as Sir Wilfrid remembered her.  The oddity, which had been violent or brutal in earlier generations, showed itself in him, one might have said, in a radical transposition of values, a singularity of criterion, which the ordinary robust Englishman might very well dismiss with impatience as folly or cant.