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 Renée 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. Renée 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. Renée 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, to die disgraced, I think we should go back to them and ask them whether their minds were as pure and holy as he supposes.” Her French wits would not be subdued. Nevil pointed to the palaces. “Pride,” said she. He argued that the original Venetians were not responsible for their offspring. “You say it?” she cried, “you, of an old race? Oh, no; you do not feel it!” and the trembling fervour of her voice convinced him that he did not, could not.