The small _table d'hôte_ of the Hotel Michel was still further diminished that night. Lady Blanche was with her daughter, and Mrs. Delafield did not appear. But the moon was hanging in glory over the lake when Julie, unable to bear her room and her thoughts any longer, threw a lace scarf about her head and neck, and went blindly climbing through the upward paths leading to Les Avants. The roads were silver in the moonlight; so was the lake, save where the great mountain shadows lay across the eastern end. And suddenly, white, through pine-trees, "Jaman, delicately tall!" The air cooled her brow, and from the deep, enveloping night her torn heart drew balm, and a first soothing of the pulse of pain. Every now and then, as she sat down to rest, a waking dream overshadowed her. She seemed to be supporting Warkworth in her arms; his dying head lay upon her breast, and she murmured courage and love into his ear. But not as Julie Le Breton. Through all the anguish of what was almost an illusion of the senses, she still felt herself Delafield's wife. And in that flood of silent speech she poured out on Warkworth, it was as though she offered him also Jacob's compassion, Jacob's homage, mingled with her own. Once she found herself sitting at the edge of a meadow, environed by the heavy scents of flowers. Some apple-trees with whitened trunks rose between her and the lake a thousand feet below. The walls of Chillon, the houses of Montreux, caught the light; opposite, the deep forests of Bouveret and St. Gingolphe lay black upon the lake; above them rode the moon. And to the east the high Alps, their pure lines a little effaced and withdrawn, as when a light veil hangs over a sanctuary. Julie looked out upon a vast freedom of space, and by a natural connection she seemed to be also surveying her own world of life and feeling, her past and her future. She thought of her childhood and her parents, of her harsh, combative youth, of the years with Lady Henry, of Warkworth, of her husband, and the life into which his strong hand had so suddenly and rashly drawn her. Her thoughts took none of the religious paths so familiar to his. And yet her reverie was so far religious that her mind seemed to herself to be quivering under the onset of affections, emotions, awes, till now unknown, and that, looking back, she was conscious of a groping sense of significance, of purpose, in all that had befallen her. Yet to this sense she could put no words. Only, in the end, through the constant action of her visualizing imagination, it connected itself with Delafield's face, and with the memory of many of his recent acts and sayings. It was one of those hours which determine the history of a man or woman. And the august Alpine beauty entered in, so that Julie, in this sad and thrilling act of self-probing, felt herself in the presence of powers and dominations divine.