she had to ask his pardon, and then had to fib to give reasons for her conduct, and then to pretend to herself that her pride was humbled by him; a most humiliating round, constantly recurring; the worse for the reflection that she created it.  She attempted silence.  Nevil spoke, and was like the magical piper:  she was compelled to follow him and dance the round again, with the wretched thought that it must resemble coquettry.  Nevil did not think so, but a very attentive observer now upon the scene, and possessed of his half of the secret, did, and warned him.  Rosamund Culling added that the French girl might be only an unconscious coquette, for she was young.  The critic would not undertake to pronounce on her suggestion, whether the candour apparent in merely coquettish instincts was not more dangerous than a battery of the arts of the sex.  She had heard Nevil’s frank confession, and seen Renee twice, when she tried in his service, though not greatly wishing for success, to stir the sensitive girl for an answer to his attachment.  Probably she went to work transparently, after the insular fashion of opening a spiritual mystery with the lancet.  Renee suffered herself to be probed here and there, and revealed nothing of the pain of the operation.  She said to Nevil, in Rosamund’s hearing: 

‘Have you the sense of honour acute in your country?’ Nevil inquired for the apropos.

‘None,’ said she.

Such pointed insolence disposed Rosamund to an irritable antagonism, without reminding her that she had given some cause for it.

Renee said to her presently:  ‘He saved my brother’s life’; the apropos being as little perceptible as before.

Her voice dropped to her sweetest deep tones, and there was a supplicating beam in her eyes, unintelligible to the direct Englishwoman, except under the heading of a power of witchery fearful to think of in one so young, and loved by Nevil.

The look was turned upon her, not upon her hero, and Rosamund thought, ‘Does she want to entangle me as well?’

It was, in truth, a look of entreaty from woman to woman, signifying need of womanly help.  Renee would have made a confidante of her, if she had not known her to be Nevil’s, and devoted to him.  ’I would speak to you, but that I feel you would betray me,’ her eyes had said.  The strong sincerity dwelling amid multiform complexities might have made itself comprehensible to the English lady for a moment or so, had Renee spoken words to her ears; but belief in it would hardly have survived the girl’s next convolutions.  ‘She is intensely French,’ Rosamund said to Nevil—­ a volume of insular criticism in a sentence.

‘You do not know her, ma’am,’ said Nevil.  ’You think her older than she is, and that is the error I fell into.  She is a child.’

’A serpent in the egg is none the less a serpent, Nevil.  Forgive me; but when she tells you the case is hopeless!’