She uttered a quick exclamation; then her face hardened, and she said in a low tone:  “De Crucis has been with you.”

He made the half-resigned, half-impatient gesture of the man who feels himself drawn into a familiar argument from which there is no issue.

“He left yesterday for Germany.”

“He was here too long!” she said, with an uncontrollable escape of bitterness.

Odo sighed.  “If you would but let me bring him to you, you would see that his influence over me is not what you think it.”

She was silent a moment; then she said:  “You are tired tonight.  Let us not talk of these things.”

“As you please,” he answered, with an air of relief; and she rose and went to the harpsichord.

She played softly, with a veiled touch, gliding from one crepuscular melody to another, till the room was filled with drifts of sound that seemed like the voice of its own shadows.  There had been times when he could have yielded himself to this languid tide of music, letting it loosen the ties of thought till he floated out into the soothing dimness of sensation; but now the present held him.  To Fulvia, too, he knew the music was but a forced interlude, a mechanical refuge from thought.  She had deliberately narrowed their intercourse to one central idea; and it was her punishment that silence had come to be merely an intensified expression of this idea.

When she turned to Odo she saw the same consciousness in his face.  It was useless for them to talk of other things.  With a pang of unreasoning regret she felt that she had become to him the embodiment of a single thought—­a formula, rather than a woman.

“Tell me what you have been doing,” she said.

The question was a relief.  At once he began to separation of his work.  All his thoughts, all his time, were given to the constitution which was to define the powers of Church and state.  The difficulties increased as the work advanced; but the gravest difficulty was one of which he dared not tell her:  his own growing distrust of the ideas for which he laboured.  He was too keenly aware of the difference in their mental operations.  With Fulvia, ideas were either rejected or at once converted into principles; with himself, they remained stored in the mind, serving rather as commentaries on life than as incentives to action.  This perpetual accessibility to new impressions was a quality she could not understand, or could conceive of only as a weakness.  Her own mind was like a garden in which nothing is ever transplanted.  She allowed for no intermediate stages between error and dogma, for no shifting of the bounds of conviction; and this security gave her the singleness of purpose in which he found himself more and more deficient.

Odo remembered that he had once thought her nearness would dispel his hesitations.  At first it had been so; but gradually the contact with her fixed enthusiasms had set up within him an opposing sense of the claims ignored.  The element of dogmatism in her faith showed the discouraging sameness of the human mind.  He perceived that to a spirit like Fulvia’s it might become possible to shed blood in the cause of tolerance.