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