She was still absorbed in contemplation of Lydia's portrait when Frederick returned with the tea-tray. But he did not seem to notice, and instead launched into an account of how he had that morning read and reviewed four three-decker novels without cutting a single page, delivered his copy, and sold all four in pristine condition in Fleet Street in time for lunch. Julia felt a certain pang at the thought of judgement being passed so lightly upon all those months or years of hard authorial labour, but reminded herself sternly that Frederick was obliged to earn most of his own living by his pen, and had not the luxury of Ernest Lockhart's twelve hundred a year, which prompted a pang of quite another sort. They started several other topics, but none of them seemed to catch fire; perhaps it was the effect of Lydia's cool, steady gaze, which Julia could neither dismiss entirely from her consciousness nor allude to directly; at any rate the constraint seemed to grow between them until she sat miserably wishing she had not come. The room, too, was very close; she could feel herself becoming flushed and overheated as her unhappiness increased, until she was obliged to ask Frederick to open a window. He sprang from his chair in a welter of apologies and threw open the French windows, letting in a welcome draught of air. Unable to bear the pressure of Lydia's regard an instant longer, Julia rose and went to join him in the doorway.
She had never been-at least she felt she had never been-so high above the ground. The balcony appeared to her no larger than a window-box, with a small semicircular floor of pressed metal, and two hooped black horizontal railings curving out into empty space. The higher of these was only a little above her own waist. Even standing in the doorway, she seemed to be looking straight down into the abyss. Julia had stood close to the edge of a precipice without feeling anything like the fear that gripped her now; the sheer, vertiginous chasm beneath her feet seemed to be drawing her irresistibly towards the brink; in another second she would surely pitch head-first over the rail and into the void. All of these impressions raced across her mind in the space of a single glimpse, during which she was also aware of Frederick turning towards her and opening his mouth as if to speak, but ridiculously slowly, so that he reminded her of some great bird ponderously opening its beak. With the same absurd slowness, she saw herself reaching for his arm to save herself from falling, suspended between terror and a strange impulse to laugh at Frederick's gathering her in such a leisurely fashion into his embrace that she seemed to have time to reacquaint herself with every nuance of his expression before feeling, at last, the pressure of his lips upon her own. The sensation of vertigo remained; perhaps they had indeed fallen, but it did not seem to matter, for she felt quite weightless, and might as easily have been floating up as down.
That evening she walked alone around the banks of the Serpentine and felt the world to be a blessed place. She knew, dimly, that the gulf between her present situation and the life she imagined herself living with Frederick might prove impassable, but she could not give him up now; perhaps her husband would bow gracefully to the inevitable; in the meantime she felt perfectly content in the warmth of the suns diminishing rays and the certainty that Frederick loved her, and would tell her so again before tomorrows sun had set. But with the next morning's post came a note which said only: "Dear Mrs Lockhart, I very much regret that I shall be unable to keep our appt this afternoon; I can only plead the most pressing and unexpected business, and pray that you will accept my most abject apologies. Believe me, yours very sincerely, Frederick Liddell."
Julia had always appreciated his tact and discretion, but the notes formal brevity, and worse, the absence of any indication as to when, or even if, she might expect to hear from him again, chilled her to the bone. In vain she struggled to reassure herself with the thought that Frederick had, after all, to earn his living as best he could; for if such demands had never before prevented him from seeing her, how could they possibly have done so now? The rest of the day crawled by beneath an ever-darkening cloud of apprehension and despair. After a sleepless night of torment, Julia could bear no more; as soon as her husband had departed for his chambers she sent Frederick an unsigned note saying she would call at his rooms at three o'clock.
He was waiting at the street door when her cab arrived. One glance at his face confirmed her worst fears. In silence they trudged up flight after flight of stairs to the room that had witnessed such extremities of rapture. As the memory flooded back to her, Julia turned towards Frederick as if praying to be woken from a nightmare. To her horror, he actually recoiled before checking himself with a forced, mechanical courtesy that set the final seal upon her humiliation. Bright sunshine streamed mockingly through the tall casements; the French windows were closed.
"Frederick; tell me what has happened."
Her lips were so numb with misery that she could barely utter the words.
"I fear-I find I am hot free," he stammered, "that is to say… that my affections are after all engaged… I had hoped to overcome
… that it would not… but I find I cannot…" He trailed off hopelessly.
"Do you mean-that there is someone else?"
"Yes." His eyes looked like the eyes of a dead man.
"Then why did you not tell me so before?"
"I did. But I had hoped…"
She did not understand until she realised that he was gesturing towards the portrait by the window. For a long moment Julia stood transfixed by Lydia's cool, implacable gaze, unwilling to comprehend what she had just heard.
"She is dead, Frederick. Whereas I…" But she could not go on.
"To the world, yes, but alas, not to me."
"And you feel you have betrayed her," said Julia bleakly.
"Yes," said Frederick. "I am most dreadfully sorry…"
Her tears would no longer be denied; she went blindly from the room and left him to his self-recrimination.
As the months passed, Julia felt herself more and more irretrievably exiled from the life she had formerly led. The longing to speak of her sorrow remained as acute as ever, but there was no one, not even her closest friend Marianne, upon whose discretion she could absolutely rely. Perhaps it Was pride that made the idea of being talked about so intolerable to her; more particularly, the idea that anyone should know that her life had been laid waste by a rejection that, to some women of her acquaintance, might have meant little more than a loss at croquet. Julia was herself bewildered by the extent of the desolation that had befallen her; it was like wandering through the abandoned ruins of a once-thriving city. "Vet so far as she could tell, most of her friends were scarcely aware of the change in her. It was very strange to look in the mirror and see the same face and form that Frederick had once called beautiful, thinner and paler, but otherwise unaltered.
Her dream of flight had not returned; instead she had been several times visited by a nightmare of finding herself high up on a shattered wall of stone, like the ruin of some great abbey whose roof had long since collapsed. Far below, mounds of fallen brickwork and rubble lay heaped upon the outlines of foundations and the remnants of other walls, with grass and weeds growing over them. At first the top of the wall on which she knelt would be relatively broad, though jagged, but in seeking a safe way to descend she would find the way becoming narrower and more precarious, the stone crumbling beneath her hands until she saw that she had crawled to the very end of a broken arch where she could only cling to a rotten tongue of stone, petrified by fear of plummeting down amidst great shards and fragments of masonry, feeling the very fabric of, the world dissolve within her grasp.