Beauchamp’s meditations were diverted by the sight of the coast of France dashed in rain-lines across a weed-strewn sea.  The ‘three days’ granted him by Renee were over, and it scarcely troubled him that he should be behind the time; he detested mystery, holding it to be a sign of pretentious feebleness, often of imposture, it might be frivolity.  Punctilious obedience to the mysterious brevity of the summons, and not to chafe at it, appeared to him as much as could be expected of a struggling man.  This was the state of the case with him, until he stood on French earth, breathed French air, and chanced to hear the tongue of France twittered by a lady on the quay.  The charm was instantaneous.  He reminded himself that Renee, unlike her countrywomen, had no gift for writing letters.  They had never corresponded since the hour of her marriage.  They had met in Sicily, at Syracuse, in the presence of her father and her husband, and so inanimate was she that the meeting seemed like the conclusion of their history.  Her brother Roland sent tidings of her by fits, and sometimes a conventional message from Tourdestelle.  Latterly her husband’s name had been cited as among the wildfires of Parisian quays, in journals more or less devoted to those unreclaimed spaces of the city.  Well, if she was unhappy, was it not the fulfilment of his prophecy in Venice?

Renee’s brevity became luminous.  She needed him urgently, and knowing him faithful to the death, she, because she knew him, dispatched purely the words which said she needed him.  Why, those brief words were the poetry of noble confidence!  But what could her distress be?  The lover was able to read that, ‘Come; I give you three days,’ addressed to him, was not language of a woman free of her yoke.

Excited to guess and guess, Beauchamp swept on to speculations of a madness that seized him bodily at last.  Were you loved, Cecilia?  He thought little of politics in relation to Renee; or of home, or of honour in the world’s eye, or of labouring to pay the fee for his share of life.  This at least was one of the forms of love which precipitate men:  the sole thought in him was to be with her.  She was Renee, the girl of whom he had prophetically said that she must come to regrets and tears.  His vision of her was not at Tourdestelle, though he assumed her to be there awaiting him:  she was under the sea-shadowing Alps, looking up to the red and gold-rosed heights of a realm of morning that was hers inviolably, and under which Renee was eternally his.

The interval between then and now was but the space of an unquiet sea traversed in the night, sad in the passage of it, but featureless—­and it had proved him right!  It was to Nevil Beauchamp as if the spirit of his old passion woke up again to glorious hopeful morning when he stood in Renee’s France.