She pointed to a landing.  He sprang to the bank.  ’It could end in nothing else,’ he said, ’unless you beat cold to me.  And now I have your hand, Renee!  It’s the hand of a living woman, you have no need to tell me that; but faithful to her comrade!  I can swear it for her—­faithful to a true alliance!  You are not married, you are simply chained:  and you are terrorized.  What a perversion of you it is!  It wrecks you.  But with me?  Am I not your lover?  You and I are one life.  What have we suffered for but to find this out and act on it?  Do I not know that a woman lives, and is not the rooted piece of vegetation hypocrites and tyrants expect her to be?  Act on it, I say; own me, break the chains, come to me; say, Nevil Beauchamp or death!  And death for you?  But you are poisoned and thwart-eddying, as you live now:  worse, shaming the Renee I knew.  Ah-Venice!  But now we are both of us wiser and stronger:  we have gone through fire.  Who foretold it?  This day, and this misery and perversion that we can turn to joy, if we will—­if you will!  No heart to dare is no heart to love!—­answer that!  Shall I see you cower away from me again?  Not this time!’

He swept on in a flood, uttered mad things, foolish things, and things of an insight electrifying to her.  Through the cottager’s garden, across a field, and within the park gates of Tourdestelle it continued unceasingly; and deeply was she won by the rebellious note in all that he said, deeply too by his disregard of the vulgar arts of wooers:  she detected none.  He did not speak so much to win as to help her to see with her own orbs.  Nor was it roughly or chidingly, though it was absolutely, that he stripped her of the veil a wavering woman will keep to herself from her heart’s lord if she can.

They arrived long after the boat at Tourdestelle, and Beauchamp might believe he had prevailed with her, but for her forlorn repetition of the question he had put to her idly and as a new idea, instead of significantly, with a recollection and a doubt ‘Have I courage, Nevil?’

The grain of common sense in cowardice caused her to repeat it when her reason was bedimmed, and passion assumed the right to show the way of right and wrong.

CHAPTER XXVI

MR. BLACKBURN TUCKHAM

Some time after Beauchamp had been seen renewing his canvass in Bevisham a report reached Mount Laurels that he was lame of a leg.  The wits of the opposite camp revived the French marquees, but it was generally acknowledged that he had come back without the lady:  she was invisible.  Cecilia Halkett rode home with her father on a dusky Autumn evening, and found the card of Commander Beauchamp awaiting her.  He might have stayed to see her, she thought.  Ladies are not customarily so very late in returning from a ride on chill evenings of Autumn.  Only a quarter of an hour was between his visit and her