Julie looked out upon a vast freedom of space, and by a natural connection she seemed to be also surveying her own world of life and feeling, her past and her future.  She thought of her childhood and her parents, of her harsh, combative youth, of the years with Lady Henry, of Warkworth, of her husband, and the life into which his strong hand had so suddenly and rashly drawn her.  Her thoughts took none of the religious paths so familiar to his.  And yet her reverie was so far religious that her mind seemed to herself to be quivering under the onset of affections, emotions, awes, till now unknown, and that, looking back, she was conscious of a groping sense of significance, of purpose, in all that had befallen her.  Yet to this sense she could put no words.  Only, in the end, through the constant action of her visualizing imagination, it connected itself with Delafield’s face, and with the memory of many of his recent acts and sayings.

It was one of those hours which determine the history of a man or woman.  And the august Alpine beauty entered in, so that Julie, in this sad and thrilling act of self-probing, felt herself in the presence of powers and dominations divine.

Her face, stained with tears, took gradually some of the calm, the loftiness of the night.  Yet the close-shut, brooding mouth would slip sometimes into a smile exquisitely soft and gentle, as though the heart remembered something which seemed to the intelligence at once folly and sweetness.

What was going on within her was, to her own consciousness, a strange thing.  It appeared to her as a kind of simplification, a return to childhood; or, rather, was it the emergence in the grown mind, tired with the clamor of its own egotistical or passionate life, of some instincts, natural to the child, which she, nevertheless, as a child had never known; instincts of trust, of self-abandonment, steeped, perhaps, in those tears which are themselves only another happiness?...

But hush!  What are our poor words in the presence of these nobler secrets of the wrestling and mounting spirit!

* * * * *

On the way down she saw another figure emerge from the dark.

“Lady Blanche!”

Lady Blanche stood still.

“The hotel was stifling,” she said, in a voice that vainly tried for steadiness.

Julie perceived that she had been weeping.

“Aileen is asleep?”

“Perhaps.  They have given her something to make her sleep.”

They walked on towards the hotel.

Julie hesitated.

“She was not disappointed?” she said, at last, in a low voice.

“No!” said the mother, sharply.  “But one knew, of course, there must be letters for her.  Thank God, she can feel that his very last thought was for her!  The letters which have reached her are dated the day before the fatal attack began—­giving a complete account of his march—­most interesting—­showing how he trusted her already—­though she is such a child.  It will tranquillize her to feel how completely she possessed his heart—­poor fellow!”