This he sent by the trusty hand of his man in black; and by mid-day Julius was announced.  He came in confident, and bright as sunshine (Lefevre thought he had never seen him looking more serene); but suddenly the sunshine was beclouded, and Julius ceased to be himself, and became a restless, timorous kind of creature, like a bird put in a cage under the eye of his captor.

“What?” he cried when he entered, with an eloquent gesture.  “Lazying in bed on such a day as this?  What does this mean?” But when he observed the pallor and weakness of Lefevre’s appearance, he paused abruptly, refrained from the hand stretched out to greet him, and exclaimed in a tone of something like terror, “Good heavens!  Are you ill?” A paleness, a shudder, and a dizziness passed upon him as if he sickened.  “May I,” he said, “open the window?”

“Certainly, Julius,” said Lefevre, in surprise and alarm.  “Do you feel ill?”

“No—­no,” said Julius from the window, where he stood letting the air play upon his face, and speaking as if he had to put considerable restraint upon himself.  “I—­I am unfortunately, miserably constituted:  I cannot help it.  I cannot bear the sight of illness, or lowness of health even.  It appals me; it—­it horrifies me with a quite instinctive horror; it deadens me.”

Lefevre, whose abundant sympathy and vitality went out instinctively to succour and bless the weak and the ill, was inexpressibly shocked and offended by this confession of what to his sense appeared selfish cowardice and inhumanity.  He had again and again heard it said, and he had with pleasure assented to the opinion, that Julius was a rare, finely-strung being, with such pure and glowing health that he shrank from contact with, or from the sight of, pain or ill-health, and even from their discussion; but now that the singularity of Julius’s organization impinged upon his own experience, now that he saw Julius shrink from himself, he was shocked and offended.  Julius, on his part, was pitiably moved.  He kept away from the bed; he fidgeted to and fro, looking at this thing and that, without a sparkle of interest in his eye, yet all with his own peculiar grace.

“You wanted to speak to me,” he said.  “Do you mind saying what you have to say and letting me go?”

“I reckoned upon your staying to lunch,” said Lefevre.

“I can’t!—­I can’t!...  Very sorry, my dear Lefevre, but I really can’t!  Forgive what seems my rudeness.  It distresses me that at such a time as this my sensations are so acute.  But I cannot help it!—­I cannot!”

“You have been in the country,—­have you not?” said Lefevre, beginning with a resolve to get at something.

“I have just come back,” said Julius.  “My man told me you had called.”

“Yes.  My mother wrote in a state of great anxiety about you, and asked me to go and look at you.  She said that she and my sister had seen a good deal of you lately; that you began to look unwell, and then ceased to appear, and she was afraid you might be ill.”