in her grave attitudes, the unfailing brilliance of her femininity.  He did not know what there was under that ivory forehead so splendidly shaped, so gloriously crowned.  He could not tell what were her thoughts, her feelings.  Her replies were reflective, always preceded by a short silence, while he hung on her lips anxiously.  He felt himself in the presence of a mysterious being in whom spoke an unknown voice, like the voice of oracles, bringing everlasting unrest to the heart.

He was thankful enough to sit in silence with secretly clenched teeth, devoured by jealousy—­and nobody could have guessed that his quiet deferential bearing to all these grey-heads was the supreme effort of stoicism, that the man was engaged in keeping a sinister watch on his tortures lest his strength should fail him.  As before, when grappling with other forces of nature, he could find in himself all sorts of courage except the courage to run away.

It was perhaps from the lack of subjects they could have in common that Miss Moorsom made him so often speak of his own life.  He did not shrink from talking about himself, for he was free from that exacerbated, timid vanity which seals so many vain-glorious lips.  He talked to her in his restrained voice, gazing at the tip of her shoe, and thinking that the time was bound to come soon when her very inattention would get weary of him.  And indeed on stealing a glance he would see her dazzling and perfect, her eyes vague, staring in mournful immobility, with a drooping head that made him think of a tragic Venus arising before him, not from the foam of the sea, but from a distant, still more formless, mysterious, and potent immensity of mankind.

CHAPTER V

One afternoon Renouard stepping out on the terrace found nobody there.  It was for him, at the same time, a melancholy disappointment and a poignant relief.

The heat was great, the air was still, all the long windows of the house stood wide open.  At the further end, grouped round a lady’s work-table, several chairs disposed sociably suggested invisible occupants, a company of conversing shades.  Renouard looked towards them with a sort of dread.  A most elusive, faint sound of ghostly talk issuing from one of the rooms added to the illusion and stopped his already hesitating footsteps.  He leaned over the balustrade of stone near a squat vase holding a tropical plant of a bizarre shape.  Professor Moorsom coming up from the garden with a book under his arm and a white parasol held over his bare head, found him there and, closing the parasol, leaned over by his side with a remark on the increasing heat of the season.  Renouard assented and changed his position a little; the other, after a short silence, administered unexpectedly a question which, like the blow of a club on the head, deprived Renouard of the power of speech and even thought, but, more cruel, left him quivering with apprehension, not of death but of everlasting torment.  Yet the words were extremely simple.