hen Jules should burst out on them in a fury
(but he must not be suffered to hurt his bride: she was too valuable a
model), they would all declare, with one voice, that this was their
revenge for his insults, they would shout their great shout of laughter;
and, next day, Jules would depart alone--"oh, alone indubitably!"--for
Rome and Florence, and they would be quits with him and his "coxcombry."

* * * * *

That is the plan, but Phene does not know it. All she knows is that
Natalia said that harm would come unless she spoke their lesson to the
end. Yet, despite this threat, when Jules has fallen silent in his
terror at her "whitening cheek and still dilating eyes," she feels at
first that that foolish speech need not be spoken. She has forgotten
half of it; she does not care now for Natalia or any of them; above all,
she wants to stay where Jules' voice has lifted her, by just letting it
go on. "But can it?" she asks piteously--for with that transferring of
silence a change had come; the music once let fall, even Jules does not
seem able to take up its life again--"no, or you would!" . . . So trust,
we see, is born in her: if Jules could do what she desires, Phene knows
he would. But since he cannot, they'll stay as they are--"above the
world."

"Oh, you--what are you?" cries the child, who never till to-day has
heard such words or seen such looks as his. But she has heard other
words, seen other looks--

"The same smile girls like me are used to bear,
But never men, men cannot stoop so low . . ."

Yet, watching those friends of Jules who came with the lesson she was to
learn, the strangest thing of all had been to see how, speaking of him,
they had used _that_ smile--

"But still Natalia said they were your friends,
And they assented though they smiled the more,
And all came round me--that thin Englishman
With light lank hair, seemed leader of the rest;
He held a paper"

--and from that paper he read what Phene had got by heart.

But oh, if she need not say it! if she could look up for ever to those
eyes, as now Jules lets her!

". . . I believe all sin,
All memory of wrong done, suffering borne,
Would drop down, low and lower, to the earth
Whence all that's low comes, and there touch and stay
--Never to overtake the rest of me,
All that, unspotted, reaches up to you,
Drawn by those eyes!"