-lipped mouth quivered
with what seemed a boyish pleasure. The comfort of money relief was
never acknowledged more frankly or more handsomely.

Julie hurriedly repressed him. Did she feel instinctively that there are
thanks which it sometimes humiliates a man to remember, lavishly as he
may have poured them out at the moment--thanks which may easily count in
the long run, not for, but against, the donor? She rather haughtily
asked what she had done but say a chance word to Lady Froswick? The
shares had to be allotted to somebody. She was glad, of course, very
glad, if he were relieved from anxiety....

So did she free herself and him from a burdensome gratitude; and they
passed to discussing the latest chances of the Mokembe appointment. The
Staff-College Colonel was no doubt formidable; the Commander-in-Chief,
who had hitherto allowed himself to be much talked to on the subject of
young Warkworth's claims by several men in high place--General M'Gill
among them--well known in Lady Henry's drawing-room, was perhaps
inclining to the new suggestion, which was strongly supported by
important people in Egypt; he had one or two recent appointments on his
conscience not quite of the highest order, and the Staff-College man, in
addition to a fine military record, was virtue, poverty, and industry
embodied; was nobody's cousin, and would, altogether, produce a
good effect.

Could anything more be done, and fresh threads set in motion?

They bandied names a little, Julie quite as subtly and minutely informed
as the man with regard to all the sources of patronage. New devices,
fresh modes of approach revealed themselves to the woman's quick brain.
Yet she did not chatter about them; still less parade her own resources.
Only, in talking with her, dead walls seemed to give way; vistas of hope
and possibility opened in the very heart of discouragement. She found
the right word, the right jest, the right spur to invention or effort;
while all the time she was caressing and appeasing her companion's
self-love--placing it like a hot-house plant in an atmosphere of
expansion and content--with that art of hers, which, for the ambitious
and irritable man, more conscious of the kicks than of the kisses of
fortune, made conversation with her an active and delightful pleasure.

"I don't know how it is," Warkworth presently declared; "but after I
have been talking to you for ten minutes the whole world seems changed.
The sky was ink, and