engagement which Nevil declared she must have in her heart, he would have done more than smile; he would have laid the case deferentially before his father.  His own opinion was that young unmarried women were incapable of the passion of love, being, as it were, but half-feathered in that state, and unable to fly; and Renee confirmed it.  The suspicion of an advocacy on Nevil’s behalf steeled her.  His tentative observations were checked at the outset.

‘Can such things be spoken of to me, Roland?  I am plighted.  You know it.’

He shrugged, said a word of pity for Nevil, and went forth to let his friend know that it was as he had predicted:  Renee was obedience in person, like a rightly educated French girl.  He strongly advised his friend to banish all hope of her from his mind.  But the mind he addressed was of a curious order; far-shooting, tough, persistent, and when acted on by the spell of devotion, indomitable.  Nevil put hope aside, or rather, he clad it in other garments, in which it was hardly to be recognized by himself, and said to Roland:  ’You must bear this from me; you must let me follow you to the end, and if she wavers she will find me near.’

Roland could not avoid asking the use of it, considering that Renee, however much she admired and liked, was not in love with him.

Nevil resigned himself to admit that she was not:  and therefore,’ said he, ‘you won’t object to my remaining.’

Renee greeted Nevil with as clear a conventional air as a woman could assume.

She was going, she said, to attend High Mass in the church of S. Moise, and she waved her devoutest Roman Catholicism to show the breadth of the division between them.  He proposed to go likewise.  She was mute.  After some discourse she contrived to say inoffensively that people who strolled into her churches for the music, or out of curiosity, played the barbarian.

‘Well, I will not go,’ said Nevil.

‘But I do not wish to number you among them,’ she said.

‘Then,’ said Nevil, ’I will go, for it cannot be barbarous to try to be with you.’

‘No, that is wickedness,’ said Renee.

She was sensible that conversation betrayed her, and Nevil’s apparently deliberate pursuit signified to her that he must be aware of his mastery, and she resented it, and stumbled into pitfalls whenever she opened her lips.  It seemed to be denied to them to utter what she meant, if indeed she had a meaning in speaking, save to hurt herself cruelly by wounding the man who had caught her in the toils:  and so long as she could imagine that she was the only one hurt, she was the braver and the harsher for it; but at the sight of Nevil in pain her heart relented and shifted, and discovering it to be so weak as to be almost at his mercy, she defended it with an aggressive unkindness, for which, in charity to her sweeter nature, she had to ask his pardon, and then had to fib to give