She answered, ‘It is my duty.’

’Your duty! it’s like taking up a dice-box, and flinging once, to certain ruin!’

’I must oppose my father to you, friend.  Do you not understand duty to parents?  They say the English are full of the idea of duty.’

’Duty to country, duty to oaths and obligations; but with us the heart is free to choose.’

‘Free to choose, and when it is most ignorant?’

‘The heart? ask it.  Nothing is surer.’

’That is not what we are taught.  We are taught that the heart deceives itself.  The heart throws your dicebox; not prudent parents.’

She talked like a woman, to plead the cause of her obedience as a girl, and now silenced in the same manner that she had previously excited him.

‘Then you are lost to me,’ he said.

They saw the gondola returning.

‘How swiftly it comes home; it loitered when it went,’ said Renee.  ’There sits my father, brimming with his picture; he has seen one more!  We will congratulate him.  This little boulevard is not much to speak of.  The hills are lovely.  Friend,’ she dropped her voice on the gondola’s approach, ‘we have conversed on common subjects.’

Nevil had her hand in his, to place her in the gondola.

She seemed thankful that he should prefer to go round on foot.  At least, she did not join in her father’s invitation to him.  She leaned back, nestling her chin and half closing her eyes, suffering herself to be divided from him, borne away by forces she acquiesced in.

Roland was not visible till near midnight on the Piazza.  The promenaders, chiefly military of the garrison, were few at that period of social protestation, and he could declare his disappointment aloud, ringingly, as he strolled up to Nevil, looking as if the cigar in his mouth and the fists entrenched in his wide trowsers-pockets were mortally at feud.  His adventure had not pursued its course luminously.  He had expected romance, and had met merchandize, and his vanity was offended.  To pacify him, Nevil related how he had heard that since the Venetian rising of ’49, Venetian ladies had issued from the ordeal of fire and famine of another pattern than the famous old Benzon one, in which they touched earthiest earth.  He praised Republicanism for that.  The spirit of the new and short-lived Republic wrought that change in Venice.

‘Oh, if they’re republican as well as utterly decayed,’ said Roland, ’I give them up; let them die virtuous.’

Nevil told Roland that he had spoken to Renee.  He won sympathy, but Roland could not give him encouragement.  They crossed and recrossed the shadow of the great campanile, on the warm-white stones of the square, Nevil admitting the weight of whatsoever Roland pointed to him in favour of the arrangement according to French notions, and indeed, of aristocratic notions everywhere, saving that it was imperative for Renee to be disposed of in marriage early.  Why rob her of her young springtime!