theme; he who with her gave out unguardedly the thoughts deepest in him.  And the thoughts!—­were they not of generous origin?  Where so true a helpmate for him as the one to whom his mind appealed?  It could not be so with the Frenchwoman.  Cecilia divined a generous nature by generosity, and set herself to believe that in honour he had not yet dared to speak to her from the heart, not being at heart quite free.  She was at the same time in her remains of pride cool enough to examine and rebuke the weakness she succumbed to in now clinging to him by that which yesterday she hardly less than loathed, still deeply disliked.

CHAPTER XXIII

TOURDESTELLE

On the part of Beauchamp, his conversation with Cecilia during the drive into Bevisham opened out for the first time in his life a prospect of home; he had felt the word in speaking it, and it signified an end to the distractions produced by the sex, allegiance to one beloved respected woman, and also a basis of operations against the world.  For she was evidently conquerable, and once matched with him would be the very woman to nerve and sustain him.  Did she not listen to him?  He liked her resistance.  That element of the barbarous which went largely to form his emotional nature was overjoyed in wresting such a woman from the enemy, and subduing her personally.  She was a prize.  She was a splendid prize, cut out from under the guns of the fort.  He rendered all that was due to his eminently good cause for its part in so signal a success, but individual satisfaction is not diminished by the thought that the individual’s discernment selected the cause thus beneficent to him.

Beauchamp’s meditations were diverted by the sight of the coast of France dashed in rain-lines across a weed-strewn sea.  The ‘three days’ granted him by Renee were over, and it scarcely troubled him that he should be behind the time; he detested mystery, holding it to be a sign of pretentious feebleness, often of imposture, it might be frivolity.  Punctilious obedience to the mysterious brevity of the summons, and not to chafe at it, appeared to him as much as could be expected of a struggling man.  This was the state of the case with him, until he stood on French earth, breathed French air, and chanced to hear the tongue of France twittered by a lady on the quay.  The charm was instantaneous.  He reminded himself that Renee, unlike her countrywomen, had no gift for writing letters.  They had never corresponded since the hour of her marriage.  They had met in Sicily, at Syracuse, in the presence of her father and her husband, and so inanimate was she that the meeting seemed like the conclusion of their history.  Her brother Roland sent tidings of her by fits, and sometimes a conventional message from Tourdestelle.  Latterly her husband’s name had been cited as among the wildfires of Parisian quays, in journals more or less devoted to those unreclaimed spaces of the city.  Well, if she was unhappy, was it not the fulfilment of his prophecy in Venice?