“When will you tell me all that I want to know about you?” he said, bending towards her with tender insistence. “There is so much I have to ask.”
“Oh, some time,” she said, hurriedly, her pulses quickening. “Mine is not a story to be told on a great day like this.”
He was silent a moment, but his face spoke for him.
“Our friendship has been a beautiful thing, hasn’t it?” he said, at last, in a voice of emotion. “Look here!” He thrust his hand into his breast-pocket and half withdrew it. “Do you see where I carry your letters?”
“You shouldn’t—they are not worthy.”
“How charming you are in that dress—in that light! I shall always see you as you are tonight.”
A silence. Excitement mounted in their veins. Suddenly he stooped and kissed her hands. They looked into each other’s eyes, and the seconds passed like hours.
Presently, in the nearer drawing-room, there was a sound of approaching voices and they moved apart.
“Julie, Emily Lawrence is going,” said the Duchess’s voice, pitched in what seemed to Julie a strange and haughty note. “Captain Warkworth, Miss Lawrence thinks that you and she have common friends—Lady Blanche Moffatt and her daughter.”
Captain Warkworth murmured some conventionality, and passed into the next drawing-room with Miss Lawrence.
Julie rose to her feet, the color dying out of her face, her passionate eyes on the Duchess, who stood facing her friend, guiltily pale, and ready to cry.
XIV
On the morning following these events, Warkworth went down to the Isle of Wight to see his mother. On the journey he thought much of Julie. They had parted awkwardly the night before. The evening, which had promised so well, had, after all, lacked finish and point. What on earth had that tiresome Miss Lawrence wanted with him? They had talked of Simla and the Moffatts. The conversation had gone in spurts, she looking at him every now and then with eyes that seemed to say more than her words. All that she had actually said was perfectly insignificant and trivial. Yet there was something curious in her manner, and when the time came for him to take his departure she had bade him a frosty little farewell.
She had described herself once or twice as a great friend of Lady Blanche Moffatt. Was it possible?
But if Lady Blanche, whose habits of sentimental indiscretion were ingrained, had gossiped to this lady, what then? Why should he be frowned on by Miss Lawrence, or anybody else? That malicious talk at Simla had soon exhausted itself. His present appointment was a triumphant answer to it all. His slanderers—including Aileen’s ridiculous guardians—could only look foolish if they pursued the matter any further. What “trap” was there—what mésalliance? A successful soldier was good enough for anybody. Look at the first Lord Clyde, and scores besides.
The Duchess, too. Why had she treated him so well at first, and so cavalierly after dinner? Her manners were really too uncertain.
What was the matter, and why did she dislike him? He pondered over it a good deal, and with much soreness of spirit. Like many men capable of very selfish or very cruel conduct, he was extremely sensitive, and took keen notice of the fact that a person liked or disliked him.
If the Duchess disliked him it could not be merely on account of the Simla story, even though the old maid might conceivably have given her a jaundiced account. The Duchess knew nothing of Aileen, and was little influenced, so far as he had observed her, by considerations of abstract justice or propriety, affecting persons whom she had never seen.
No, she was Julie’s friend, the little wilful lady, and it was for Julie she ruffled her feathers, like an angry dove.
So his thoughts had come back to Julie, though, indeed, it seemed to him that they were never far from her. As he looked absently from the train windows on the flying landscape, Julie’s image hovered between him and it—a magic sun, flooding soul and senses with warmth. How unconsciously, how strangely his feelings had changed towards her! That coolness of temper and nerve he had been able to preserve towards her for so long was, indeed, breaking down. He recognized the danger, and wondered where it would lead him. What a fascinating, sympathetic creature!—and, by George! what she had done for him!
Aileen! Aileen was a little sylph, a pretty child-angel, white-winged and innocent, who lived in a circle of convent thoughts, knowing nothing of the world, and had fallen in love with him as the first man who had ever made love to her. But this intelligent, full-blooded woman, who could understand at a word, or a half word, who had a knowledge of affairs which many a high-placed man might envy, with whom one never had a dull moment—this courted, distinguished Julie Le Breton—his mind swelled with half-guilty pride at the thought that for six months he had absorbed all her energies, that a word from him could make her smile or sigh, that he could force her to look at him with eyes so melting and so troubled as those with which she had given him her hands—her slim, beautiful hands—that night in Grosvenor Square.
How freedom became her! Dependency had dropped from her, like a cast-off cloak, and beside her fresh, melancholy charm, the airs and graces of a child of fashion and privilege like the little Duchess appeared almost cheap and trivial. Poor Julie! No doubt some social struggle was before her. Lady Henry was strong, after all, in this London world, and the solider and stupider people who get their way in the end were not, she thought, likely to side with Lady Henry’s companion in a quarrel where the facts of the story were unquestionably, at first sight, damaging to Miss Le Breton. Julie would have her hours of
