“You are quite right—­quite right,” said Julie, almost with eagerness.  “She has, indeed.”

The Duke was taken by surprise.  Imperious as he was, and stiffened by a good many of those petty prides which the spoiled children of the world escape so hardly, he found himself hesitating—­groping for his words.

The Duchess meanwhile drew Julie impulsively towards a chair.

“Do sit down.  You look so tired.”

But Julie’s gaze was still bent upon the Duke.  She restrained her friend’s eager hand, and the Duke collected himself. He brought a chair, and Julie seated herself.

“I am deeply, deeply distressed about Lady Henry,” she said, in a low voice, by which the Duke felt himself most unwillingly penetrated.  “I don’t—­oh no, indeed, I don’t defend last night.  Only—­my position has been very difficult lately.  I wanted very much to see the Duchess—­and—­it was natural—­wasn’t it?—­that the old friends should like to be personally informed about Lady Henry’s illness?  But, of course, they stayed too long; it was my fault—­I ought to have prevented it.”

She paused.  This stern-looking man, who stood with his back to the mantel-piece regarding her, Philistine though he was, had yet a straight, disinterested air, from which she shrank a little.  Honestly, she would have liked to tell him the truth.  But how could she?  She did her best, and her account certainly was no more untrue than scores of narratives of social incident which issue every day from lips the most respected and the most veracious.  As for the Duchess, she thought it the height of candor and generosity.  The only thing she could have wished, perhaps, in her inmost heart, was that she had not found Julie alone with Harry Warkworth.  But her loyal lips would have suffered torments rather than accuse or betray her friend.

The Duke meanwhile went through various phases of opinion as Julie laid her story before him.  Perhaps he was chiefly affected by the tone of quiet independence—­as from equal to equal—­in which she addressed him.  His wife’s cousin by marriage; the granddaughter of an old and intimate friend of his own family; the daughter of a man known at one time throughout Europe, and himself amply well born—­all these facts, warm, living, and still efficacious, stood, as it were, behind this manner of hers, prompting and endorsing it.  But, good Heavens! was illegitimacy to be as legitimacy?—­to carry with it no stains and penalties?  Was vice to be virtue, or as good?  The Duke rebelled.

“It is a most unfortunate affair, of that there can be no doubt,” he said, after a moment’s silence, when Julie had brought her story to an end; and then, more sternly, “I shall certainly apologize for my wife’s share in it.”

“Lady Henry won’t be angry with the Duchess long,” said Julie Le Breton.  “As for me”—­her voice sank—­“my letter this morning was returned to me unopened.”