‘No, friend, I am not complaining.’  Renee put out her hand to him; with compassionate irony feigning to have heard excuses.  ’What right have I to complain?  I have not the sensation.  I could not expect you to be everlastingly the sentinel of love.  Three times I rejected you!  Now that I have lost my father—­Oh! poor father:  I trifled with my lover, I tricked him that my father might live in peace.  He is dead.  I wished you to marry one of your own countrywomen, Nevil.  You said it was impossible; and I, with my snake at my heart, and a husband grateful for nursing and whimpering to me for his youth like a beggar on the road, I thought I owed you this debt of body and soul, to prove to you I have some courage; and for myself, to reward myself for my long captivity and misery with one year of life:  and adieu to Roland my brother! adieu to friends! adieu to France!  Italy was our home.  I dreamed of one year in Italy; I fancied it might be two; more than that was unimaginable.  Prisoners of long date do not hope; they do not calculate:  air, light, they say; to breathe freely and drop down!  They are reduced to the instincts of the beasts.  I thought I might give you happiness, pay part of my debt to you.  Are you remembering Count Henri?  That paints what I was!  I could fly to that for a taste of life! a dance to death!  And again you ask:  Why, if I loved you then, not turn to you in preference?  No, you have answered it yourself, Nevil;—­on that day in the boat, when generosity in a man so surprised me, it seemed a miracle to me; and it was, in its divination.  How I thank my dear brother Roland for saving me the sight of you condemned to fight, against your conscience!  He taught poor M. d’Henriel his lesson.  You, Nevil, were my teacher.  And see how it hangs:  there was mercy for me in not having drawn down my father’s anger on my heart’s beloved.  He loved you.  He pitied us.  He reproached himself.  In his last days he was taught to suspect our story:  perhaps from Roland; perhaps I breathed it without speaking.  He called heaven’s blessings on you.  He spoke of you with tears, clutching my hand.  He made me feel he would have cried out:  “If I were leaving her with Nevil Beauchamp!” and “Beauchamp,” I heard him murmuring once:  “take down Froissart”:  he named a chapter.  It was curious:  if he uttered my name Renee, yours, “Nevil,” soon followed.  That was noticed by Roland.  Hope for us, he could not have had; as little as I!  But we were his two:  his children.  I buried him—­I thought he would know our innocence, and now pardon our love.  I read your letters, from my name at the beginning, to yours at the end, and from yours back to mine, and between the lines, for any doubtful spot:  and oh, rash!  But I would not retrace the step for my own sake.  I am certain of your love for me, though . . .’  She paused:  ’Yes, I am certain of it.  And if I am a burden to you?’

’About as much as the air, which I can’t do without since I began to breathe it,’ said Beauchamp, more clear-mindedly now that he supposed he was addressing a mind, and with a peril to himself that escaped his vigilance.  There was a secret intoxication for him already in the half-certainty that the step could not be retraced.  The idea that he might reason with her, made her seductive to the heart and head of him.