eing accomplices by
brushing them away, as weeping girls do that cry for comfort. Nevil had
saved her brother's life, and had succoured her countrymen; he loved
her, and was a hero. He should not have said he loved her; that was
wrong; and it was shameful that he should have urged her to disobey her
father. But this hero's love of her might plead excuses she did not know
of; and if he was to be excused, he, unhappy that he was, had a claim
on her for more than tears. She wept resentfully. Forces above her own
swayed and hurried her like a lifeless body dragged by flying wheels:
they could not unnerve her will, or rather, what it really was, her
sense of submission to a destiny. Looked at from the height of the
palm-waving cherubs over the fallen martyr in the picture, she seemed
as nerveless as a dreamy girl. The raised arms and bent elbows were an
illusion of indifference. Her shape was rigid from hands to feet, as if
to keep in a knot the resolution of her mind; for the second and in that
young season the stronger nature grafted by her education fixed her
to the religious duty of obeying and pleasing her father, in contempt,
almost in abhorrence, of personal inclinations tending to thwart him and
imperil his pledged word. She knew she had inclinations to be tender.
Her hands released, how promptly might she not have been confiding her
innumerable perplexities of sentiment and emotion to paper, undermining
self-governance; self-respect, perhaps! Further than that, she did not
understand the feelings she struggled with; nor had she any impulse to
gaze on him, the cause of her trouble, who walked beside her brother
below, talking betweenwhiles in the night's grave undertones. Her
trouble was too overmastering; it had seized her too mysteriously,
coming on her solitariness without warning in the first watch of the
night, like a spark crackling serpentine along dry leaves to sudden
flame. A thought of Nevil and a regret had done it.

CHAPTER VIII. A NIGHT ON THE ADRIATIC

The lovers met after Roland had spoken to his sister--not exactly to
advocate the cause of Nevil, though he was under the influence of that
grave night's walk with him, but to sound her and see whether she at
all shared Nevil's view of her situation. Roland felt the awfulness of
a French family arrangement of a marriage, and the impertinence of a
foreign Cupid's intrusion, too keenly to plead for his friend: at the
same time he loved his friend and