Her face, stained with tears, took gradually some of the calm, the loftiness of the night. Yet the close-shut, brooding mouth would slip sometimes into a smile exquisitely soft and gentle, as though the heart remembered something which seemed to the intelligence at once folly and sweetness. What was going on within her was, to her own consciousness, a strange thing. It appeared to her as a kind of simplification, a return to childhood; or, rather, was it the emergence in the grown mind, tired with the clamor of its own egotistical or passionate life, of some instincts, natural to the child, which she, nevertheless, as a child had never known; instincts of trust, of self-abandonment, steeped, perhaps, in those tears which are themselves only another happiness?... But hush! What are our poor words in the presence of these nobler secrets of the wrestling and mounting spirit! * * * * * On the way down she saw another figure emerge from the dark. "Lady Blanche!" Lady Blanche stood still. "The hotel was stifling," she said, in a voice that vainly tried for steadiness. Julie perceived that she had been weeping. "Aileen is asleep?" "Perhaps. They have given her something to make her sleep." They walked on towards the hotel. Julie hesitated. "She was not disappointed?" she said, at last, in a low voice. "No!" said the mother, sharply. "But one knew, of course, there must be letters for her. Thank God, she can feel that his very last thought was for her! The letters which have reached her are dated the day before the fatal attack began--giving a complete account of his march--most interesting--showing how he trusted her already--though she is such a child. It will tranquillize her to feel how completely she possessed his heart--poor fellow!" Julie said nothing, and Lady Blanche, with bitter satisfaction, felt rather than saw what seemed to her the just humiliation expressed in the drooping and black-veiled figure beside her. Next day there was once more a tinge of color on Aileen's cheeks. Her beautiful hair fell round her once more in a soft life and confusion, and the roses which her mother had placed beside her on the bed were not in too pitiful contrast with her frail loveliness. "Read it, please," she said, as soon as she found herself alone with Julie, pushing her letter tenderly towards her. "He tells me everything--everything! All he was doing and hoping--consults me in everything. Isn't it an honor--when I'm so ignorant and childish? I'll try to be brave--try to be worthy--" And while her whole frame was shaken with deep, silent sobs, she greedily watched Julie read the letter. "Oughtn't I to try and live," she said, dashing away her tears, as Julie returned it, "when he loved me so?"