iguring to herself with
quiet simplicity of mind that her spirit was independent of them as long
as she restrained her hands from being 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 marriag