So everybody would be turned away.  Julie paced the drawing-room a solitary figure amid its lights and flowers—­solitary and dejected.  In a couple of hours’ time all her particular friends would come to the door, and it would be shut against them.  “Of course, expect me to-night,” had been the concluding words of her letter of the morning.  Several people also had announced themselves for this evening whom it was extremely desirable she should see.  A certain eminent colonel, professor at the Staff College, was being freely named in the papers for the Mokembe mission.  Never was it more necessary for her to keep all the threads of her influence in good working order.  And these Wednesday evenings offered her the occasions when she was most successful, most at her ease—­especially whenever Lady Henry was not well enough to leave the comparatively limited sphere of the back drawing-room.

Moreover, the gatherings themselves ministered to a veritable craving in Julie Le Breton—­the craving for society and conversation.  She shared it with Lady Henry, but in her it was even more deeply rooted.  Lady Henry had ten talents in the Scriptural sense—­money, rank, all sorts of inherited bonds and associations.  Julie Le Breton had but this one.  Society was with her both an instinct and an art.  With the subtlest and most intelligent ambition she had trained and improved her natural gift for it during the last few years.  And now, to the excitement of society was added the excitement of a new and tyrannous feeling, for which society was henceforth a mere weapon to be used.

She fumed and fretted for a while in silence.  Every now and then she would pause in front of one of the great mirrors of the room, and look at the reflection of her tall thinness and the trailing satin of her gown.

“The girl—­so pretty, in a gossamer sort of way,” The words echoed in her mind, and vaguely, beside her own image in the glass, there rose a vision of girlhood—­pale, gold hair, pink cheeks, white frock—­and she turned away, miserable, from that conscious, that intellectual distinction with which, in general, she could persuade herself to be very fairly satisfied.

Hutton, the butler, came in to look at the fire.

“Will you be sitting here to-night, miss?”

“Oh no, Hutton.  I shall go back to the library.  I think the fire in my own room is out.”

“I had better put out these lights, anyway,” said the man, looking round the brilliant room.

“Oh, certainly,” said Julie, and she began to assist him to do so.

Suddenly a thought occurred to her.

“Hutton!” She went up to him and spoke in a lower tone.  “If the Duchess of Crowborough comes to-night, I should very much like to see her, and I know she wants to see me.  Do you think it could possibly disturb Lady Henry if you were to show her into the library for twenty minutes?”

The man considered.