It seemed unlike morning to the lovers, but as if night had broken with a revelation of the kingdom in the heart of night.  While the broad smooth waters rolled unlighted beneath that transfigured upper sphere, it was possible to think the scene might vanish like a view caught out of darkness by lightning.  Alp over burning Alp, and around them a hueless dawn!  The two exulted they threw off the load of wonderment, and in looking they had the delicious sensation of flight in their veins.

Renee stole toward Nevil.  She was mystically shaken and at his mercy; and had he said then, ‘Over to the other land, away from Venice!’ she would have bent her head.

She asked his permission to rouse her brother and madame, so that they should not miss the scene.

Roland lay in the folds of his military greatcoat, too completely happy to be disturbed, Nevil Beauchamp chose to think; and Rosamund Culling, he told Renee, had been separated from her husband last on these waters.

‘Ah! to be unhappy here,’ sighed Renee.  ’I fancied it when I begged her to join us.  It was in her voice.’

The impressionable girl trembled.  He knew he was dear to her, and for that reason, judging of her by himself, he forbore to urge his advantage, conceiving it base to fear that loving him she could yield her hand to another; and it was the critical instant.  She was almost in his grasp.  A word of sharp entreaty would have swung her round to see her situation with his eyes, and detest and shrink from it.  He committed the capital fault of treating her as his equal in passion and courage, not as metal ready to run into the mould under temporary stress of fire.

Even later in the morning, when she was cooler and he had come to speak, more than her own strength was needed to resist him.  The struggle was hard.  The boat’s head had been put about for Venice, and they were among the dusky-red Chioggian sails in fishing quarters, expecting momently a campanile to signal the sea-city over the level.  Renee waited for it in suspense.  To her it stood for the implacable key of a close and stifling chamber, so different from this brilliant boundless region of air, that she sickened with the apprehension; but she knew it must appear, and soon, and therewith the contraction and the gloom it indicated to her mind.  He talked of the beauty.  She fretted at it, and was her petulant self again in an epigrammatic note of discord.

He let that pass.

‘Last night you said “one night,"’ he whispered.  ’We will have another sail before we leave Venice.’

’One night, and in a little time one hour! and next one minute! and there’s the end,’ said Renee.

Her tone alarmed him.  ‘Have you forgotten that you gave me your hand?’

‘I gave my hand to my friend.’

‘You gave it to me for good.’

‘No; I dared not; it is not mine.’

‘It is mine,’ said Beauchamp.