ve, this transformation of the man's earlier prudence, or ambition,
or duplicity, into this eager tenderness, this anguish in separation....

"Listen, dear!" He whispered to her. "All my business can be got through
the day before you come. I have two men to see. A day will be ample. I
dine at the Embassy to-morrow night--that is arranged; the day after I
lunch with the Military Secretary; then--a thousand regrets, but I must
hurry on to meet some friends in Italy. So I turn my back on Paris, and
for two days I belong to Julie--and she to me. Say yes,
Julie--my Julie!"

He bent over her, his hands framing her face.

"Say yes," he urged, "and put off for both of us that word--_alone_!"

His low voice sank into her heart. He waited, till his strained sense
caught the murmured words which conveyed to him the madness and the
astonishment of victory.

* * * * *

Leonie had shut up the house, in a grim silence, and had taken her way
up-stairs to bed.

Julie, too, was in her room. She sat on the edge of her bed, her head
drooped, her hands clasped before her absently, like Hope still
listening for the last sounds of the harp of life. The candle beside her
showed her, in the big mirror opposite, her grace, the white confusion
of her dress.

She had expected reaction, but it did not come. She was still borne on a
warm tide of will and energy. All that she was about to do seemed to her
still perfectly natural and right. Petty scruples, conventional
hesitations, the refusal of life's great moments--these are what are
wrong, these are what disgrace!

Romance beckoned to her, and many a secret tendency towards the lawless
paths of conduct, infused into her by the associations and affections of
her childhood. The _horror naturalis_ which protects the great majority
of women from the wilder ways of passion was in her weakened or dormant.
She was the illegitimate child of a mother who had defied law for love,
and of that fact she had been conscious all her life.

A sharp contempt, indeed, arose within her for the interpretation that
the common mind would be sure to place upon her action.

"What matter! I am my own mistress--responsible to no one. I choose for
myself--I dare for myself!"

And when at last she rose, first loosening and then twisting the black
masses of her hair, it seemed to her that the form in the glass was that
of another woman, treading another earth. She trampled cowardice