‘Why not for women?’

‘Honourable women, I mean,’ said Renee.

Beauchamp inclined to forget his position in finding matter to contest.

Yet it is beyond contest that there is no step backward in life.  She spoke well; better than he, and she won his deference by it.  Not only she spoke better:  she was truer, distincter, braver:  and a man ever on the look-out for superior qualities, and ready to bow to them, could not refuse her homage.  With that a saving sense of power quitted him.

‘You wrote to me that you were unchanged, Nevil.’

‘I am.’

‘So, then, I came.’

His rejoinder was the dumb one, commonly eloquent and satisfactory.

Renee shut her eyes with a painful rigour of endurance.  She opened them to look at him steadily.

The desperate act of her flight demanded immediate recognition from him in simple language and a practical seconding of it.  There was the test.

‘I cannot stay in this house, Nevil; take me away.’

She named her hotel in her French English, and the sound of it penetrated him with remorseful pity.  It was for him, and of his doing, that she was in an alien land and an outcast!

‘This house is wretched for you,’ said he:  ’and you must be hungry.  Let me . . .’

‘I cannot eat.  I will ask you’:  she paused, drawing on her energies, and keeping down the throbs of her heart:  ‘this:  do you love me?’

‘I love you with all my heart and soul.’

‘As in Normandy?’

‘Yes.’

‘In Venice?’

‘As from the first, Renee!  That I can swear.’

’Oaths are foolish.  I meant to ask you—­my friend, there is no question in my mind of any other woman:  I see you love me:  I am so used to consider myself the vain and cowardly creature, and you the boldest and faithfullest of men, that I could not abandon the habit if I would:  I started confiding in you, sure that I should come to land.  But I have to ask you:  to me you are truth:  I have no claim on my lover for anything but the answer to this:—­Am I a burden to you?’

His brows flew up in furrows.  He drew a heavy breath, for never had he loved her more admiringly, and never on such equal terms.  She was his mate in love and daring at least.  A sorrowful comparison struck him, of a little boat sailing out to a vessel in deep seas and left to founder.

Without knotting his mind to acknowledge or deny the burden, for he could do neither, he stood silent, staring at her, not so much in weakness as in positive mental division.  No, would be false; and Yes, not less false; and if the step was irretrievable, to say Yes would be to plunge a dagger in her bosom; but No was a vain deceit involving a double wreck.  Assuredly a man standing against the world in a good cause, with a runaway wife on his hands, carries a burden, however precious it be to him.