“You forget I’m a Catholic,” said Julie, smiling rather doubtfully.

“Are you, Julie?  I’d forgotten.”

“The good nuns at Bruges took care of that.”

“Do you ever go to mass?”

“Sometimes.”

“Then you’re not a good Catholic, Julie?”

“No,” said Julie, after a pause, “not at all.  But it sometimes catches hold of me.”

The old clock in the hall struck.  The Duchess sprang up.

“Oh, Julie, I have got to be at Clarisse’s by four.  I promised her I’d go and settle about my Drawing-room dress to-day.  Let’s see the rest of the house.”

And they went rapidly through it.  All of it was stamped with the same character, representing, as it were, the meeting-point between an inherited luxury and a personal asceticism.  Beautiful chairs, or cabinets transported sixty years before from one of the old Crowborough houses in the country to this little abode, side by side with things the cheapest and the commonest—­all that Cousin Mary Leicester could ever persuade herself to buy with her own money.  For all the latter part of her life she had been half a mystic and half a great lady, secretly hating the luxury from which she had not the strength to free herself, dressing ceremoniously, as the Duchess had said, for a solitary dinner, and all the while going in sore remembrance of a Master who “had not where to lay his head.”

At any rate, there was an ample supply of household stuff for a single woman and her maids.  In the china cupboard there were still the old-fashioned Crown Derby services, the costly cut glass, the Leeds and Wedgewood dessert dishes that Cousin Mary Leicester had used for half a century.  The caretaker produced the keys of the iron-lined plate cupboard, and showed its old-world contents, clean and in order.

“Why, Julie!  If we’d only ordered the dinner I might have come to dine with you to-night!” cried the Duchess, enjoying and peering into everything like a child with its doll’s house.  “And the linen—­gracious!” as the doors of another cupboard were opened to her.  “But now I remember, Freddie said nothing was to be touched till he made up his mind what to do with the little place.  Why, there’s everything!”

And they both looked in astonishment at the white, fragrant rows, at the worn monogram in the corners of the sheets, at the little bags of lavender and pot-pourri ranged along the shelves.

Suddenly Julie turned away and sat down by an open window, carrying her eyes far from the house and its stores.

“It is too much, Evelyn,” she said, sombrely.  “It oppresses me.  I don’t think I can live up to it.”

“Julie!” and again the little Duchess came to stand caressingly beside her.  “Why, you must have sheets—­and knives and forks!  Why should you get ugly new ones, when you can use Cousin Mary’s?  She would have loved you to have them.”

“She would have hated me with all her strength,” said Miss Le Breton, probably with much truth.