-feathered in that state, and unable to fly; and Renée confirmed
it. The suspicion of an advocacy on Nevil's behalf steeled her. His tentative
observations were checked at the outset.
    »Can such things be spoken of to me, Roland? I am plighted. You know it.«
    He shrugged, said a word of pity for Nevil, and went forth to let his friend
know that it was as he had predicted: Renée was obedience in person, like a
rightly educated French girl. He strongly advised his friend to banish all hope
of her from his mind. But the mind he addressed was of a curious order;
far-shooting, tough, persistent, and when acted on by the spell of devotion,
indomitable. Nevil put hope aside, or rather, he clad it in other garments, in
which it was hardly to be recognized by himself, and said to Roland: »You must
bear this from me; you must let me follow you to the end, and if she wavers she
will find me near.«
    Roland could not avoid asking the use of it, considering that Renée, however
much she admired and liked, was not in love with him.
    Nevil resigned himself to admit that she was not: »and therefore,« said he,
»you won't object to my remaining.«
    Renée greeted Nevil with as clear a conventional air as a woman could
assume.
    She was going, she said, to attend High Mass in the church of S. Moïse, and
she waved her devoutest Roman Catholicism to show the breadth of the division
between them. He proposed to go likewise. She was mute. After some discourse she
contrived to say inoffensively that people who strolled into her churches for
the music, or out of curiosity, played the barbarian.
    »Well, I will not go,« said Nevil.
    »But I do not wish to number you among them,« she said.
    »Then,« said Nevil, »I will go, for it cannot be barbarous to try to be with
you.«
    »No, that is wickedness,« said Renée.
    She was sensible that conversation betrayed her, and Nevil's apparently
deliberate pursuit signified to her that he must be aware of his mastery, and
she resented it, and stumbled into pitfalls whenever she opened her lips. It
seemed to be denied to them to utter what she meant, if indeed she had a meaning
in speaking, save to hurt herself cruelly by wounding the man who had caught her
in the toils: and so long as
