These secrets of feeling left her constantly pale and silent.  Yet her grace had never been more evident.  All the inmates of the little pension, the landlord’s family, the servants, the visitors, as the days passed, felt the romance and thrill of her presence.  Lady Blanche evoked impatience of ennui.  She was inconsiderate; she was meddlesome; she soon ceased even to be pathetic.  But for Julie every foot ran, every eye smiled.

Then, when the day was over, Delafield’s opportunity began.  Julie could not sleep.  He gradually established the right to read with her and talk with her.  It was a relation very singular, and very intimate.  She would admit him at his knock, and he would find her on her sofa, very sad, often in tears, her black hair loose upon her shoulders.  Outwardly there was often much ceremony, even distance between them; inwardly, each was exploring the other, and Julie’s attitude towards Delafield was becoming more uncertain, more touched with emotion.

What was, perhaps, most noticeable in it was a new timidity, a touch of anxious respect towards him.  In the old days, what with her literary cultivation and her social success, she had always been the flattered and admired one of their little group.  Delafield felt himself clumsy and tongue-tied beside her.  It was a superiority on her part very natural and never ungraceful, and it was his chief delight to bring it forward, to insist upon it, to take it for granted.

But the relation between them had silently shifted.

“You judge—­you are always judging,” she had said once, impatiently, to Delafield.  And now it was round these judgments, these inward verdicts of his, on life or character, that she was perpetually hovering.  She was infinitely curious about them.  She would wrench them from him, and then would often shiver away from him in resentment.

He, meanwhile, as he advanced further in the knowledge of her strange nature, was more and more bewildered by her—­her perversities and caprices, her brilliancies and powers, her utter lack of any standard or scheme of life.  She had been for a long time, as it seemed to him, the creature of her exquisite social instincts—­then the creature of passion.  But what a woman through it all, and how adorable, with those poetic gestures and looks, those melancholy, gracious airs that ravished him perpetually!  And now this new attitude, as of a child leaning, wistfully looking in your face, asking to be led, to be wrestled and reasoned with.

The days, as they passed, produced in him a secret and mounting intoxication.  Then, perhaps for a day or two, there would be a reaction, both foreseeing that a kind of spiritual tyranny might arise from their relation, and both recoiling from it....

One night she was very restless and silent.  There seemed to be no means of approach to her true mind.  Suddenly he took her hand—­it was some days since they had spoken of Warkworth—­and almost roughly reminded her of her promise to tell him all.