fore which the
little Duchess shrank. "But, of course, if I can do anything to please
you, Evelyn--you know I like to please you."

But she had never meant, she had never promised to forswear his society,
to ban him from the new house. In truth she would rather have left home
and friends and prospects, at one stroke, rather than have pledged
herself to anything of the sort. Evelyn should never bind her to that.

Then, during his days of absence, she had passed through wave after wave
of feeling, while all the time to the outer eye she was occupied with
nothing but the settlement into Lady Mary's strange little house. She
washed, dusted, placed chairs and tables. And meanwhile a wild
expectancy of his first letter possessed her. Surely there would be some
anxiety in it, some fear, some disclosure of himself, and of the
struggle in his mind between interest and love?

Nothing of the kind. His first letter was the letter of one sure of his
correspondent, sure of his reception and of his ground; a happy and
intimate certainty shone through its phrases; it was the letter, almost,
of a lover whose doubts are over.

The effect of it was to raise a tempest, sharp and obscure, in Julie's
mind. The contrast between the _pose_ of the letter and the sly reality
behind bred a sudden anguish of jealousy, concerned not so much with
Warkworth as with this little, unknown creature, who, without any
effort, any desert--by the mere virtue of money and blood--sat waiting
in arrogant expectancy till what she desired should come to her. How was
it possible to feel any compunction towards her? Julie felt none.

As to the rest of Miss Lawrence's gossip--that Warkworth was supposed to
have "behaved badly," to have led the pretty child to compromise herself
with him at Simla in ways which Simla society regarded as inadmissible
and "bad form"; that the guardians had angrily intervened, and that he
was under a promise, habitually broken by the connivance of the girl's
mother, not to see or correspond with the heiress till she was
twenty-one, in other words, for the next two years--what did these
things matter to her? Had she ever supposed that Warkworth, in regard to
money or his career, was influenced by any other than the ordinary
worldly motives? She knew very well that he was neither saint nor
ascetic. These details--or accusations--did not, properly speaking,
concern her at all. She had divined and accepted his character, in all
its aver