He mounted and called, ‘Au revoir, M. le Capitaine.’

‘Au revoir, M. le Commandant,’ cried Beauchamp.

‘Admiral and marshal, each of us in good season,’ said Roland.  ’Thanks to your promotion, I had a letter from my sister.  Advance a grade, and I may get another.’

Beauchamp thought of the strange gulf now between him and the time when he pined to be a commodore, and an admiral.  The gulf was bridged as he looked at Renee petting Roland’s horse.

‘Is there in the world so lovely a creature?’ she said, and appealed fondlingly to the beauty that brings out beauty, and, bidding it disdain rivalry, rivalled it insomuch that in a moment of trance Beauchamp with his bodily vision beheld her, not there, but on the Lido of Venice, shining out of the years gone.

Old love reviving may be love of a phantom after all.  We can, if it must revive, keep it to the limits of a ghostly love.  The ship in the Arabian tale coming within the zone of the magnetic mountain, flies all its bolts and bars, and becomes sheer timbers, but that is the carelessness of the ship’s captain; and hitherto Beauchamp could applaud himself for steering with prudence, while Renee’s attractions warned more than they beckoned.  She was magnetic to him as no other woman was.  Then whither his course but homeward?

After they had taken leave of their host and hostess of Chateau Dianet, walking across a meadow to a line of charmilles that led to the river-side, he said, ’Now I have seen Roland I shall have to decide upon going.’

‘Wantonly won is deservedly lost,’ said Renee.  ’But do not disappoint my Roland much because of his foolish sister.  Is he not looking handsome?  And he is young to be a commandant, for we have no interest at this Court.  They kept him out of the last war!  My father expects to find you at Tourdestelle, and how account to him for your hurried flight? save with the story of that which brought you to us!’

‘The glove?  I shall beg for the fellow to it before I depart, marquise.’

’You perceived my disposition to light-headedness, monsieur, when I was a girl.’

’I said that I—­But the past is dust.  Shall I ever see you in England?’

’That country seems to frown on me.  But if I do not go there, nor you come here, except to imperious mysterious invitations, which will not be repeated, the future is dust as well as the past:  for me, at least.  Dust here, dust there!—­if one could be like a silk-worm, and live lying on the leaf one feeds on, it would be a sort of answer to the riddle—­living out of the dust, and in the present.  I find none in my religion.  No doubt, Madame de Breze did:  why did you call Diane so to M. Livret?’

She looked at him smiling as they came out of the shadow of the clipped trees.  He was glancing about for the boat.

‘The boat is across the river,’ Renee said, in a voice that made him seek her eyes for an explanation of the dead sound.  She was very pale.  ’You have perfect command of yourself?  For my sake!’ she said.