Early in September Julia spoke in Bradford and Keighley, and on the following Sunday she slipped away and went to Haworth, not only to rest and read a number of letters forwarded by her solicitors, but to worship at the shrine of the Bront?s.

She took a fly at the station in the valley, but halfway up the steep road which leads to the village she descended precipitately; the fly and the horse had executed a right angle. She walked the rest of the distance, the rough stones giving a foothold, and soon reached the long crooked street which begins with the Black Bull Inn and finishes at the moor. Short streets ending nowhere radiated from this central thoroughfare at irregular intervals. There was no business to speak of in Haworth. The men worked in Keighley or Bradford, the young women in the worsted mills of the valley. Julia, driving the day before, had watched the long procession of girls, shawls pinned about their heads, file out of the factories, and, two by two, cross the valley either to the road that led up to Haworth, or to another village higher above the moor. It was the proud boast of Haworth that every inhabitant had a bank book, and Julia felt it would be a relief to visit one village where there was no poverty. It looked trim and prosperous, picturesque though it was, and such men and women as were to be seen had none of that pinched hopeless look which had put fire into so many of her speeches.

After she had duly admired Branwell Bront?’s chair, which the landlady of the inn assumed she had come to see, and had made it understood that she really intended to stay overnight, she was shown to a large room upstairs, overlooking the churchyard. The inn, in fact, formed one of its walls, and there were flat stones directly beneath her window. It was a gloomy crowded churchyard, with toppling box-tombs and heavy dusty trees, its farther boundary the low stone parsonage that had sheltered the Bront?s. They, too, could read the inscriptions on the stones from their windows. Small wonder they died of consumption.

From the street came the sound of children’s voices and wooden clogs. Her room, with its old four-post bed, was almost sumptuous. Julia would have liked to stay a month. But time pressed. She established herself comfortably and slit the large envelope containing her letters.

At sight of one she sat upright and changed color, but put it aside to read last.

The first she opened was from the duke. He wrote tersely and to the point. This was his final warning. The next time she should receive his communication through his solicitors. Another was from Hadji Sadr? containing much advice and some approval. Her mother, to whom Mrs. Winstone had sent numerous printed accounts of her “performances,” wrote as briefly as the duke and even more to the point. Julia was a public woman and a disgrace to her blood. (It would never have occurred to Mrs. Edis to add that she was a disgrace to her sex.) The request for Fanny had some time since been curtly refused.

Then she looked at the envelope of Tay’s letter, and finally opened it. To her surprise it was dated May second. It began characteristically.

“Do I remember you? Gee! Well! Rather, oh, princess of the eyes and hair. Things have happened since last we met, not forgetting April sixteenth of the current year, but I can see you as plainly as I saw the chimney fall on my bed on the date just mentioned. Yes, I’ve grown some, and you may imagine me, at the present moment, if you please, dressed in khaki and top-boots, with a beard of three weeks’ growth (I’m as smooth as a play-actor generally) and almost as much dirt; for water, like everything else in this now historic town, is mighty scarce. At the present moment I am stifling in the linen closet, that being the only room in my wrecked home without a window; if I lit a candle where it could be seen I’d be liable to a bullet in my devoted head, such being the stern ardors of those new to authority. I’ve not had a minute to answer your letter in the daytime. What between standing in the bread-line for hours on end (often with a Chinaman in front and a nigger behind) that my poor old parents may not starve—every servant deserted on the 16th—and cooking two meals a day in the street (lucky I’ve always been a good camper), and hustling round Oakland the rest of the time, trying to patch up the house of Tay, besides inditing many pages of foolscap to assure the eastern and Central American firms we do business with that we are still at the same old stand (so they won’t sell us out to somebody else),—well, my golden princess of the tower, you can figure out that I’m pretty busy.

“I wish you could have seen the old town, for there’ll never be a new one like it, conglomeration of weird and separate eras as it was; but on the whole I’d rather you saw it now. It makes the Roman Forum look like thirty cents. Imagine miles of broken walls, columns, and arches, of all shades of red and brown and smoky gray, yawning cellars full of twisted débris, one heap of ruins with a dome like an immense bird-cage, still supporting something they called a statue, but never much to look at until its present chance to appear suspended in air. If it wasn’t the wreck of my town, I’d have some artistic spasms, but as it is, I’m only thinking out ways and means to get rid of these artistic ruins as quickly as possible.

“It’s rather fine, do you know, the enthusiasm of these homeless, meatless, pretty-well-cleaned-out inhabitants, for the great new city that is to be. We all feel like pioneers—and look like them!—but with this difference: we know that we are in at the making of a great new city, and the old boys never knew what was coming to them, or how soon they’d move on. Here we stick, and sixty earthquakes couldn’t shake us off, or take the courage out of us. It is almost worth while.

“And, oh, Lord, how we do love one............