But Rose’s daughter!  All one could say was that she had turned out as the child of such proceedings might be expected to turn out—­a minx.  The aunt’s conviction as to that stood firm.  And while Rose’s face and fate had sunk into the shadows of the past, even for her sister, Aileen was here, struggling for her delicate, threatened life, her hand always in the hand of this woman who had tried to steal her lover from her, her soft, hopeless eyes, so tragically unconscious, bent upon the bold intriguer.

What possessed the child?  Warkworth’s letters, Julie’s company—­those seemed to be all she desired.

And at last, in the June beauty and brilliance, when a triumphant summer had banished the pitiful spring, when the meadows were all perfume and color, and the clear mountains, in a clear sky, upheld the ever-new and never-ending pomp of dawn and noon and night, the little, wasted creature looked up into Julie’s face, and, without tears, gasped out her story.

“These are his letters.  Some day I’ll—­I’ll read you some of them; and this—­is his picture.  I know you saw him at Lady Henry’s.  He mentioned your name.  Will you please tell me everything—­all the times you saw him, and what he talked of?  You see I am much stronger.  I can bear it all now.”

* * * * *

Meanwhile, for Delafield, this fortnight of waiting—­waiting for the African letters, waiting for the revival of life in Aileen—­was a period of extraordinary tension, when all the powers of nerve and brain seemed to be tested and tried to the utmost.  He himself was absorbed in watching Julie and in dealing with her.

In the first place, as he saw, she could give no free course to grief.  The tragic yearning, the agonized tenderness and pity which consumed her, must be crushed out of sight as far as possible.  They would have been an offence to Lady Blanche, a bewilderment to Aileen.  And it was on her relation to her new-found cousin that, as Delafield perceived, her moral life for the moment turned.  This frail girl was on the brink of perishing because death had taken Warkworth from her.  And Julie knew well that Warkworth had neither loved her nor deserved her—­that he had gone to Africa and to death with another image in his heart.

There was a perpetual and irreparable cruelty in the situation.  And from the remorse of it Julie could not escape.  Day by day she was more profoundly touched by the clinging, tender creature, more sharply scourged by the knowledge that the affection developing between them could never be without its barrier and its mystery, that something must always remain undisclosed, lest Aileen cast her off in horror.

It was a new moral suffering, in one whose life had been based hitherto on intellect, or passion.  In a sense it held at bay even her grief for Warkworth, her intolerable compassion for his fate.  In sheer dread lest the girl should find her out and hate her, she lost insensibly the first poignancy of sorrow.