"I know where your heart was," he said, with firmness. "You will banish that man from your thoughts in time. He has no right to be there. I take all the risks--all."
"Well, at least for you, I am no hypocrite," she said, with a quivering lip. "You know what I am."
"Yes, I know, and I am at your feet."
The tears dropped from Julie's eyes. She turned away and hid her face against one of the piers of the wall.
Delafield attempted no caress. He quietly set himself to draw the life that he had to offer her, the comradeship that he proposed to her. Not a word of what the world called his "prospects" entered in. She knew very well that he could not bring himself to speak of them. Rather, a sort of ascetic and mystical note made itself heard in all he said of the future, a note that before now had fascinated and controlled a woman whose ambition was always strangely tempered with high, poetical imagination.
Yet, ambitious she was, and her mind inevitably supplied what his voice left unsaid.
"He will have to fill his place whether he wishes it or no," she said to herself. "And if, in truth, he desires my help--"
Then she shrank from her own wavering. Look where she would into her life, it seemed to her that all was monstrous and out of joint.
"You don't realize what you ask," she said, at last, in despair. "I am not what you call a good woman--you know it too well. I don't measure things by your standards. I am capable of such a journey as you found me on. I can't find in my own mind that I repent it at all. I can tell a lie--you can't. I can have the meanest and most sordid thoughts--you can't. Lady Henry thought me an intriguer--I am one. It is in my blood. And I don't know whether, in the end, I could understand your language and your life. And if I don't, I shall make you miserable."
She looked up, her slender frame straightening under what was, in truth, a noble defiance.