a wife, to my duties as a mother,
I will be no less faithful to the instincts of my heart. Hear me," she
cried in an unsteady voice, "henceforth I belong to _him_ no longer."

By a gesture, dreadful to see in its undisguised loathing she indicated
her husband.

"The social code demands that I shall make his existence happy," she
continued. "I will obey, I will be his servant, my devotion to him
shall be boundless; but from to-day I am a widow. I will neither be a
prostitute in my own eyes nor in those of the world. If I do not belong
to M. d'Aiglemont, I will never belong to another. You shall have
nothing, nothing save this which you have wrung from me. This is the
doom which I have passed upon myself," she said, looking proudly at him.
"And now, know this--if you give way to a single criminal thought, M.
d'Aiglemont's widow will enter a convent in Spain or Italy. By an evil
chance we have spoken of our love; perhaps that confession was bound to
come; but our hearts must never vibrate again like this. To-morrow you
will receive a letter from England, and we shall part, and never see
each other again."

The effort had exhausted all Julie's strength. She felt her knees
trembling, and a feeling of deathly cold came over her. Obeying a
woman's instinct, she sat down, lest she should sink into Arthur's arms.

"_Julie!_" cried Lord Grenville.

The sharp cry rang through the air like a crack of thunder. Till then he
could not speak; now, all the words which the dumb lover could not utter
gathered themselves in that heartrending appeal.

"Well, what is wrong with her?" asked the General, who had hurried up at
that cry, and now suddenly confronted the two.

"Nothing serious," said Julie, with that wonderful self-possession which
a woman's quick-wittedness usually brings to her aid when it is most
called for. "The chill, damp air under the walnut tree made me feel
quite faint just now, and that must have alarmed this doctor of mine.
Does he not look on me as a very nearly finished work of art? He
was startled, I suppose, by the idea of seeing it destroyed." With
ostentatious coolness she took Lord Grenville's arm, smiled at her
husband, took a last look at the landscape, and went down the pathway,
drawing her traveling companion with her.

"This certainly is the grandest view that we have seen," she said; "I
shall never forget it. Just look, Victor, what distance, what an expanse
of country, and what variety in it! I h