Renee asked him if he cared so much for society.

He replied that women must have it, just as men must have exercise.

‘Old women, Nevil; intriguers, tattlers.’

‘Young women, Renee.’

She signified no.

He shook the head of superior knowledge paternally.

Her instinct of comedy set a dimple faintly working in her cheek.

‘Not if they love, Nevil.’

‘At least,’ said he, ’a man does not like to see the woman he loves banished by society and browbeaten.’

‘Putting me aside, do you care for it, Nevil?’

‘Personally not a jot.’

‘I am convinced of that,’ said Renee.

She spoke suspiciously sweetly, appearing perfect candour.

The change in him was perceptible to her.  The nature of the change was unfathomable.

She tried her wits at the riddle.  But though she could be an actress before him with little difficulty, the torment of her situation roused the fever within her at a bare effort to think acutely.  Scarlet suffused her face:  her brain whirled.

’Remember, dearest, I have but offered myself:  you have your choice.  I can pass on.  Yes, I know well I speak to Nevil Beauchamp; you have drilled me to trust you and your word as a soldier trusts to his officer—­once a faint-hearted soldier!  I need not remind you:  fronting the enemy now, in hard truth.  But I want your whole heart to decide.  Give me no silly, compassion!  Would it have been better to me to have written to you?  If I had written I should have clipped my glorious impulse, brought myself down to earth with my own arrow.  I did not write, for I believed in you.’

So firm had been her faith in him that her visions of him on the passage to England had resolved all to one flash of blood-warm welcome awaiting her:  and it says much for her natural generosity that the savage delicacy of a woman placed as she now was, did not take a mortal hurt from the apparent voidness of this home of his bosom.  The passionate gladness of the lover was wanting:  the chivalrous valiancy of manful joy.

Renee shivered at the cloud thickening over her new light of intrepid defiant life.

’Think it not improbable that I have weighed everything I surrender in quitting France,’ she said.

Remorse wrestled with Beauchamp and flung him at her feet.

Renee remarked on the lateness of the hour.

He promised to conduct her to her hotel immediately.

‘And to-morrow?’ said Renee, simply, but breathlessly.

’To-morrow, let it be Italy!  But first I telegraph to Roland and Tourdestelle.  I can’t run and hide.  The step may be retrieved:  or no, you are right; the step cannot, but the next to it may be stopped—­that was the meaning I had!  I ’ll try.  It ’s cutting my hand off, tearing my heart out; but I will.  O that you were free!  You left your husband at Tourdestelle?’