chained like Renee was the most revolting of prospects to a man who cherished his freedom that he might work to the end of his time.  Moreover, it swung a thunder-cloud across his holiday.  He recurred to the idea of the holiday repeatedly, and the more he did so the thinner it waned.  He was exhausting the very air and spirit of it with a mind that ran incessantly forward and back; and when he and the lady of so much speculation were again together, an incapacity of observation seemed to have come over him.  In reality it was the inability to reflect on his observations.  Her presence resembled those dark sunsets throwing the spell of colour across the world; when there is no question with us of morning or of night, but of that sole splendour only.

Owing to their arrival late at the chateau, covers were laid for them in the boudoir of Madame la Marquise, where he had his hostess to himself, and certainly the opportunity of studying her.  An English Navy List, solitary on a shelf, and laid within it an extract of a paper announcing the return of the Ariadne to port, explained the mystery of her knowing that he was in England, as well as the correctness of the superscription of her letter to him.  ‘You see, I follow you,’ she said.

Beauchamp asked if she read English now.

’A little; but the paper was dispatched to me by M. Vivian Ducie, of your embassy in Paris.  He is in the valley.’

The name of Ducie recalled Lord Palmet’s description of the dark beauty of the fluttering pale gold ornaments.  She was now dressed without one decoration of gold or jewel, with scarcely a wave in the silk, a modesty of style eloquent of the pride of her form.

Could those eyes fronting him under the lamp have recently shed tears?  They were the living eyes of a brilliant unembarrassed lady; shields flinging light rather than well-depths inviting it.

Beauchamp tried to compare her with the Renee of Venice, and found himself thinking of the glove she had surrendered to the handsomest young man in France.  The effort to recover the younger face gave him a dead creature, with the eyelashes of Renee, the cast of her mouth and throat, misty as a shape in a dream.

He could compare her with Cecilia, who never would have risked a glove, never have betrayed a tear, and was the statelier lady, not without language:  but how much less vivid in feature and the gift of speech!  Renee’s gift of speech counted unnumbered strings which she played on with a grace that clothed the skill, and was her natural endowment—­an art perfected by the education of the world.  Who cannot talk!—­but who can?  Discover the writers in a day when all are writing!  It is as rare an art as poetry, and in the mouths of women as enrapturing, richer than their voices in music.