attitude suggested an idea that he had an oration for you.  Seen from a distance, his baldness and strong nasal projection were not winning features; the youthful standard he had evidently prescribed to himself in his dress and his ready jerks of acquiescence and delivery might lead a forlorn rival to conceive him something of an ogre straining at an Adonis.  It could not be disputed that he bore his disappointment remarkably well; the more laudably, because his position was within a step of the ridiculous, for he had shot himself to the mark, despising sleep, heat, dust, dirt, diet, and lo, that charming object was deliberately slipping out of reach, proving his headlong journey an absurdity.

As he stood declining to participate in the lunatic voyage, and bidding them perforce good speed off the tips of his fingers, Renee turned her eyes on him, and away.  She felt a little smart of pity, arising partly from her antagonism to Roland’s covert laughter:  but it was the colder kind of feminine pity, which is nearer to contempt than to tenderness.  She sat still, placid outwardly, in fear of herself, so strange she found it to be borne out to sea by her sailor lover under the eyes of her betrothed.  She was conscious of a tumultuous rush of sensations, none of them of a very healthy kind, coming as it were from an unlocked chamber of her bosom, hitherto of unimagined contents; and the marquis being now on the spot to defend his own, she no longer blamed Nevil:  it was otherwise utterly.  All the sweeter side of pity was for him.

He was at first amazed by the sudden exquisite transition.  Tenderness breathed from her, in voice, in look, in touch; for she accepted his help that he might lead her to the stern of the vessel, to gaze well on setting Venice, and sent lightnings up his veins; she leaned beside him over the vessel’s rails, not separated from him by the breadth of a fluttering riband.  Like him, she scarcely heard her brother when for an instant he intervened, and with Nevil she said adieu to Venice, where the faint red Doge’s palace was like the fading of another sunset north-westward of the glory along the hills.  Venice dropped lower and lower, breasting the waters, until it was a thin line in air.  The line was broken, and ran in dots, with here and there a pillar standing on opal sky.  At last the topmost campanile sank.

Renee looked up at the sails, and back for the submerged city.

‘It is gone!’ she said, as though a marvel had been worked; and swiftly:  ‘we have one night!’

She breathed it half like a question, like a petition, catching her breath.  The adieu to Venice was her assurance of liberty, but Venice hidden rolled on her the sense of the return and plucked shrewdly at her tether of bondage.

They set their eyes toward the dark gulf ahead.  The night was growing starry.  The softly ruffled Adriatic tossed no foam.

‘One night?’ said Nevil; ‘one?  Why only one?’