The pang struck her when he uttered some words about Mrs. Culling, and protection, and Roland.

She thanked him.

So have common executioners been thanked by queenly ladies baring their necks to the axe.

He called up the pain he suffered to vindicate him; and it was really an agony of a man torn to pieces.

‘I have done the best.’

This dogged and stupid piece of speech was pitiable to hear from Nevil Beauchamp.

‘You think so?’ said she; and her glass-like voice rang a tremour in its mildness that swelled through him on the plain submissive note, which was more assent than question.

‘I am sure of it.  I believe it.  I see it.  At least I hope so.’

‘We are chiefly led by hope,’ said Renee.

‘At least, if not!’ Beauchamp cried.  ’And it’s not too late.  I have no right—­I do what I can.  I am at your mercy.  Judge me later.  If I am ever to know what happiness is, it will be with you.  It’s not too late either way.  There is Roland—­my brother as much as if you were my wife!’

He begged her to let him have Roland’s exact address.

She named the regiment, the corps d’armee, the postal town, and the department.

‘Roland will come at a signal,’ he pursued; ’we are not bound to consult others.’

Renee formed the French word of ‘we’ on her tongue.

He talked of Roland and Roland, his affection for him as a brother and as a friend, and Roland’s love of them both.

‘It is true,’ said Renee.

‘We owe him this; he represents your father.’

‘All that you say is true, my friend.’

’Thus, you have come on a visit to madame, your old friend here—­oh! your hand.  What have I done?’

Renee motioned her hand as if it were free to be taken, and smiled faintly to make light of it, but did not give it.

‘If you had been widowed!’ he broke down to the lover again.

’That man is attached to the remnant of his life:  I could not wish him dispossessed of it,’ said Rende.

‘Parted! who parts us?  It’s for a night.  Tomorrow!’

She breathed:  ‘To-morrow.’

To his hearing it craved an answer.  He had none.  To talk like a lover, or like a man of honour, was to lie.  Falsehood hemmed him in to the narrowest ring that ever statue stood on, if he meant to be stone.

‘That woman will be returning,’ he muttered, frowning at the vacant door.  ’I could lay out my whole life before your eyes, and show you I am unchanged in my love of you since the night when Roland and I walked on the Piazzetta . . .’

‘Do not remind me; let those days lie black!’ A sympathetic vision of her maiden’s tears on the night of wonderful moonlight when, as it seemed to her now, San Giorgio stood like a dark prophet of her present abasement and chastisement, sprang tears of a different character, and weak as she was with her soul’s fever and for want of food, she was piteously shaken.  She said with some calmness:  ’It is useless to look back.  I have no reproaches but for myself.  Explain nothing to me.  Things that are not comprehended by one like me are riddles I must put aside.  I know where I am:  I scarcely know more.  Here is madame.’