flow; it was dangerous to blame him, harshly.  She let them roll down, figuring to herself with quiet simplicity of mind that her spirit was independent of them as long as she restrained her hands from being accomplices by brushing them away, as weeping girls do that cry for comfort.  Nevil had saved her brother’s life, and had succoured her countrymen; he loved her, and was a hero.  He should not have said he loved her; that was wrong; and it was shameful that he should have urged her to disobey her father.  But this hero’s love of her might plead excuses she did not know of; and if he was to be excused, he, unhappy that he was, had a claim on her for more than tears.  She wept resentfully.  Forces above her own swayed and hurried her like a lifeless body dragged by flying wheels:  they could not unnerve her will, or rather, what it really was, her sense of submission to a destiny.  Looked at from the height of the palm-waving cherubs over the fallen martyr in the picture, she seemed as nerveless as a dreamy girl.  The raised arms and bent elbows were an illusion of indifference.  Her shape was rigid from hands to feet, as if to keep in a knot the resolution of her mind; for the second and in that young season the stronger nature grafted by her education fixed her to the religious duty of obeying and pleasing her father, in contempt, almost in abhorrence, of personal inclinations tending to thwart him and imperil his pledged word.  She knew she had inclinations to be tender.  Her hands released, how promptly might she not have been confiding her innumerable perplexities of sentiment and emotion to paper, undermining self-governance; self-respect, perhaps!  Further than that, she did not understand the feelings she struggled with; nor had she any impulse to gaze on him, the cause of her trouble, who walked beside her brother below, talking betweenwhiles in the night’s grave undertones.  Her trouble was too overmastering; it had seized her too mysteriously, coming on her solitariness without warning in the first watch of the night, like a spark crackling serpentine along dry leaves to sudden flame.  A thought of Nevil and a regret had done it.

CHAPTER VIII

A NIGHT ON THE ADRIATIC

The lovers met after Roland had spoken to his sister—­not exactly to advocate the cause of Nevil, though he was under the influence of that grave night’s walk with him, but to sound her and see whether she at all shared Nevil’s view of her situation.  Roland felt the awfulness of a French family arrangement of a marriage, and the impertinence of a foreign Cupid’s intrusion, too keenly to plead for his friend:  at the same time he loved his friend and his sister, and would have been very ready to smile blessings on them if favourable circumstances had raised a signal; if, for example, apoplexy or any other cordial ex machina intervention had removed the middle-aged marquis; and, perhaps, if Renee had shown the repugnance to her