His nature was too prompt in responding to such a call on it for resolute warmth.

‘If I had been firmer then, or you one year older!’ he said.

‘That girl in Venice had no courage,’ said Renee.

She raised her head and looked about the room.

Her instinct of love sounded her lover through, and felt the deficiency or the contrariety in him, as surely as musical ears are pained by a discord that they require no touchstone to detect.  Passion has the sensitiveness of fever, and is as cruelly chilled by a tepid air.

‘Yes, a London house after Venice and Normandy!’ said Beauchamp, following her look.

’Sicily:  do not omit Syracuse; you were in your naval uniform:  Normandy was our third meeting,’ said Renee.  ’This is the fourth.  I should have reckoned that.’

‘Why?  Superstitiously?’

’We cannot be entirely wise when we have staked our fate.  Sailors are credulous:  you know them.  Women are like them when they embark . . .  Three chances!  Who can boast of so many, and expect one more!  Will you take me to my hotel, Nevil?’

The fiction of her being free could not be sustained.

’Take you and leave you?  I am absolutely at your command.  But leave you?  You are alone:  and you have told me nothing.’

What was there to tell?  The desperate act was apparent, and told all.

Renee’s dark eyelashes lifted on him, and dropped.

‘Then things are as I left them in Normandy?’ said he.

She replied:  ‘Almost.’

He quivered at the solitary word; for his conscience was on edge.  It ran the shrewdest irony through him, inexplicably.  ‘Almost’:  that is, ’with this poor difference of one person, now finding herself worthless, subtracted from the list; no other; it should be little to them as it is little to you’:  or, reversing it, the substance of the word became magnified and intensified by its humble slightness:  ’Things are the same, but for the jewel of the province, a lustre of France, lured hither to her eclipse’—­meanings various, indistinguishable, thrilling and piercing sad as the half-tones humming round the note of a strung wire, which is a blunt single note to the common ear.

Beauchamp sprang to his feet and bent above her:  ’You have come to me, for the love of me, to give yourself to me, and for ever, for good, till death?  Speak, my beloved Renee.’

Her eyes were raised to his:  ‘You see me here.  It is for you to speak.’

‘I do.  There’s nothing I ask for now—­if the step can’t be retrieved.’

‘The step retrieved, my friend?  There is no step backward in life.’

‘I am thinking of you, Renee.’

‘Yes, I know,’ she answered hurriedly.

‘If we discover that the step is a wrong one?’ he pursued:  ’why is there no step backward?’

‘I am talking of women,’ said Renee.