more than kind, and gave me some fresh opportunities of which I was very glad to avail myself.  Well, we shall know soon.

“You told me once that if, or when, this happened, you would turn to your pen, and that Dr. Meredith would find you openings.  That is not to be regretted, I think.  You have great gifts, which will bring you pleasure in the using.  I have got a good deal of pleasure out of my small ones.  Did you know that once, long ago, when I was stationed at Gibraltar, I wrote a military novel?

“No, I don’t pity you because you will need to turn your intellect to account.  You will be free, and mistress of your fate.  That, for those who, like you and me, are the ’children of their works,’ as the Spaniards say, is much.

     “Dear friend—­kind, persecuted friend!—­I thought of you in
     the watches of the night—­I think of you this morning.  Let me
     soon have news of you.”

Julie put the letter down upon her knee.  Her face stiffened.  Nothing that she had ever received from him yet had rung so false.

Grief?  Complaint?  No!  Just a calm grasp of the game—­a quick playing of the pieces—­so long as the game was there to play.  If he was appointed to this mission, in two or three weeks he would be gone—­to the heart of Africa.  If not—­

Anyway, two or three weeks were hers.  Her mind seemed to settle and steady itself.

She got up and went once more carefully through the house, giving her attention to it.  Yes, the whole had character and a kind of charm.  The little place would make, no doubt, an interesting and distinguished background for the life she meant to put into it.  She would move in at once—­in three days at most.  Ways and means were for the moment not difficult.  During her life with Lady Henry she had saved the whole of her own small rentes.  Three hundred pounds lay ready to her hand in an investment easily realized.  And she would begin to earn at once.

Therese—­that should be her room—­the cheerful, blue-papered room with the south window.  Julie felt a strange rush of feeling as she thought of it.  How curious that these two—­Leonie and little Therese—­should be thus brought back into her life!  For she had no doubt whatever that they would accept with eagerness what she had to offer.  Her foster-sister had married a school-master in one of the Communal schools of Bruges while Julie was still a girl at the convent.  Leonie’s lame child had been much with her grandmother, old Madame Le Breton.  To Julie she had been at first unwelcome and repugnant.  Then some quality in the frail creature had unlocked the girl’s sealed and often sullen heart.

While she had been living with Lady Henry, these two, the mother and child, had been also in London; the mother, now a widow, earning her bread as an inferior kind of French governess, the child boarded out with various persons, and generally for long periods of the year in hospital or convalescent home.  To visit her in her white hospital bed—­to bring her toys and flowers, or merely kisses and chat—­had been, during these years, the only work of charity on Julie’s part which had been wholly secret, disinterested, and constant.