"If all that were true, I would rather risk it a thousand times over than go out of your life again--a stranger. Julie, you have done mad things for love--you should know what love is. Look in my face--there--your eyes in mine! Give way! The dead ask it of you--and it is God's will." And as, drawn by the last, low-spoken words, Julie looked up into his face, she felt herself enveloped by a mystical and passionate tenderness that paralyzed her resistance. A force, superhuman, laid its grasp upon her will. With a burst of tears, half in despair, half in revolt, she submitted. XXII In the first week of May, Julie Le Breton married Jacob Delafield in the English Church at Florence. The Duchess was there. So was the Duke--a sulky and ill-resigned spectator of something which he believed to be the peculiar and mischievous achievement of his wife. At the church door Julie and Delafield left for Camaldoli. "Well, if you imagine that I intend to congratulate you or anybody else upon that performance you are very much mistaken," said the Duke, as he and his wife drove back to the "Grand Bretagne" together. "I don't deny it's--risky," said the Duchess, her hands on her lap, her eyes dreamily following the streets. "Risky!" repeated the Duke, shrugging his shoulders. "Well, I don't want to speak harshly of your friends, Evelyn, but Miss Le Breton--" "Mrs. Delafield," said the Duchess. "Mrs. Delafield, then"--the name was evidently a difficult mouthful--"seems to me a most undisciplined and unmanageable woman. Why does she look like a tragedy queen at her marriage? Jacob is twice too good for her, and she'll lead him a life. And how you can reconcile it to your conscience to have misled me so completely as you have in this matter, I really can't imagine." "Misled you?" said Evelyn. Her innocence was really a little hard to bear, and not even the beauty of her blue eyes, now happily restored to him, could appease the mentor at her side. "You led me plainly to believe," he repeated, with emphasis, "that if I helped her through the crisis of leaving Lady Henry she would relinquish her designs on Delafield." "Did I?" said the Duchess. And putting her hands over her face she laughed rather hysterically. "But that wasn't why you lent her the house, Freddie." "You coaxed me into it, of course," said the Duke. "No, it was Julie herself got the better of you," said Evelyn, triumphantly. "You felt her spell, just as we all do, and wanted to do something for her." "Nothing of the sort," said the Duke, determined to admit no recollection to his disadvantage. "It was your doing entirely." The Duchess thought it discreet to let him at least have the triumph of her silence, smiling, and a little sarcastic though it were.