on D.W.]

This was to be infinitely more than a naval lieutenant. But Nevil claimed
her as little personally as he allowed her to be claimed by another. The
graces of her freaks of petulance and airy whims, her sprightly jets of
wilfulness, fleeting frowns of contempt, imperious decisions, were all
beautiful, like silver-shifting waves, in this lustrous planet of her
pure freedom; and if you will seize the divine conception of Artemis, and
own the goddess French, you will understand his feelings.

But though he admired fervently, and danced obediently to her tunes,
Nevil could not hear injustice done to a people or historic poetic city
without trying hard to right the mind guilty of it. A newspaper
correspondent, a Mr. John Holles, lingering on his road home from the
army, put him on the track of an Englishman's books--touching the spirit
as well as the stones of Venice, and Nevil thanked him when he had turned
some of the leaves.

The study of the books to school Renee was pursued, like the Bianchina's
sleep, in gondoletta, and was not unlike it at intervals. A translated
sentence was the key to a reverie. Renee leaned back, meditating; he
forward, the book on his knee: Roland left them to themselves, and spied
for the Bianchina behind the window-bars. The count was in the churches
or the Galleries. Renee thought she began to comprehend the spirit of
Venice, and chided her rebelliousness.

'But our Venice was the Venice of the decadence, then!' she said,
complaining. Nevil read on, distrustful of the perspicuity of his own
ideas.

'Ah, but,' said she, 'when these Venetians were rough men, chanting like
our Huguenots, how cold it must have been here!'

She hoped she was not very wrong in preferring the times of the great
Venetian painters and martial doges to that period of faith and
stone-cutting. What was done then might be beautiful, but the life was
monotonous; she insisted that it was Huguenot; harsh, nasal, sombre,
insolent, self-sufficient. Her eyes lightened for the flashing colours
and pageantries, and the threads of desperate adventure crossing the Rii
to this and that palace-door and balcony, like faint blood-streaks; the
times of Venice in full flower. She reasoned against the hard eloquent
Englishman of the books. 'But we are known by our fruits, are we not? and
the Venice I admire was surely the fruit of these stonecutters chanting
hymns of faith; it could not but be: and if it deserved, as he says,