his sister, and would have been very
ready to smile blessings on them if favourable circumstances had raised
a signal; if, for example, apoplexy or any other cordial ex machina
intervention had removed the middle-aged marquis; and, perhaps, if Renee
had shown the repugnance to her engagement which Nevil declared she must
have in her heart, he would have done more than smile; he would have
laid the case deferentially before his father. His own opinion was that
young unmarried women were incapable of the passion of love, being, as
it were, but half-feathered in that state, and unable to fly; and Renee
confirmed it. The suspicion of an advocacy on Nevil's behalf steeled
her. His tentative observations were checked at the outset.

'Can such things be spoken of to me, Roland? I am plighted. You know
it.'

He shrugged, said a word of pity for Nevil, and went forth to let his
friend know that it was as he had predicted: Renee was obedience in
person, like a rightly educated French girl. He strongly advised
his friend to banish all hope of her from his mind. But the mind he
addressed was of a curious order; far-shooting, tough, persistent, and
when acted on by the spell of devotion, indomitable. Nevil put hope
aside, or rather, he clad it in other garments, in which it was hardly
to be recognized by himself, and said to Roland: 'You must bear this
from me; you must let me follow you to the end, and if she wavers she
will find me near.'

Roland could not avoid asking the use of it, considering that Renee,
however much she admired and liked, was not in love with him.

Nevil resigned himself to admit that she was not: and therefore,' said
he, 'you won't object to my remaining.'

Renee greeted Nevil with as clear a conventional air as a woman could
assume.

She was going, she said, to attend High Mass in the church of S. Moise,
and she waved her devoutest Roman Catholicism to show the breadth of the
division between them. He proposed to go likewise. She was mute. After
some discourse she contrived to say inoffensively that people who
strolled into her churches for the music, or out of curiosity, played
the barbarian.

'Well, I will not go,' said Nevil.

'But I do not wish to number you among them,' she said.

'Then,' said Nevil, 'I will go, for it cannot be barbarous to try to be
with you.'

'No, that is wickedness,' said Renee.

She was sensible that conversation betrayed her, and Nevil's apparently
deliberate purs