* * * * *

Within twenty-four hours Delafield had received a telegram from his friend at Zanzibar.  For the most part it recapitulated the news already sent to Cairo, and thence transmitted to the English papers.  But it added the information that Warkworth had been buried in the neighborhood of a certain village on the caravan route to Mokembe, and that special pains had been taken to mark the spot.  And the message concluded:  “Fine fellow.  Hard luck.  Everybody awfully sorry here.”

These words brought Delafield a sudden look of passionate gratitude from Julie’s dark and sunken eyes.  She rested her face against his sleeve and pressed his hand.

Lady Blanche also wept over the telegram, exclaiming that she had always believed in Henry Warkworth, and now, perhaps, those busybodies who at Simla had been pleased to concern themselves with her affairs and Aileen’s would see cause to be ashamed of themselves.

To Delafield’s discomfort, indeed, she poured out upon him a stream of confidences he would have gladly avoided.  He had brought the telegram to her sitting-room.  In the room adjoining it was Aileen, still, according to her mother’s account, very ill, and almost speechless.  Under the shadow of such a tragedy it seemed to him amazing that a mother could find words in which to tell her daughter’s story to a comparative stranger.  Lady Blanche appeared to him an ill-balanced and foolish woman; a prey, on the one hand, to various obscure jealousies and antagonisms, and on the other to a romantic and sentimental temper which, once roused, gloried in despising “the world,” by which she generally meant a very ordinary degree of prudence.

She was in chronic disagreement, it seemed, with her daughter’s guardians, and had been so from the first moment of her widowhood, the truth being that she was jealous of their legal powers over Aileen’s fortune and destiny, and determined, notwithstanding, to have her own way with her own child.  The wilfulness and caprice of the father, which had taken such strange and desperate forms in Rose Delaney, appeared shorn of all its attraction and romance in the smaller, more conventional, and meaner egotisms of Lady Blanche.

And yet, in her own way, she was full of heart.  She lost her head over a love affair.  She could deny Aileen nothing.  That was what her casual Indian acquaintances meant by calling her “sweet.”  When Warkworth’s attentions, pushed with an ardor which would have driven any prudent mother to an instant departure from India, had made a timid and charming child of eighteen the talk of Simla, Lady Blanche, excited and dishevelled—­was it her personal untidiness which accounted for the other epithet of “quaint,” which had floated to the Duchess’s ear, and been by her reported to Julie?—­refused to break her daughter’s heart.  Warkworth, indeed, had begun long before by flattering the mother’s vanity and sense of possession, and she now threw herself hotly into his cause as against Aileen’s odious trustees.