above her own
swayed and hurried her like a lifeless body dragged by flying wheels: they could
not unnerve her will, or rather, what it really was, her sense of submission to
a destiny. Looked at from the height of the palm-waving cherubs over the fallen
martyr in the picture, she seemed as nerveless as a dreamy girl. The raised arms
and bent elbows were an illusion of indifference. Her shape was rigid from hands
to feet, as if to keep in a knot the resolution of her mind; for the second and
in that young season the stronger nature grafted by her education fixed her to
the religious duty of obeying and pleasing her father, in contempt, almost in
abhorrence, of personal inclinations tending to thwart him and imperil his
pledged word. She knew she had inclinations to be tender. Her hands released,
how promptly might she not have been confiding her innumerable perplexities of
sentiment and emotion to paper, undermining self-governance; self-respect,
perhaps! Further than that, she did not understand the feelings she struggled
with; nor had she any impulse to gaze on him, the cause of her trouble, who
walked beside her brother below, talking betweenwhiles in the night's grave
undertones. Her trouble was too overmastering; it had seized her too
mysteriously, coming on her solitariness without warning in the first watch of
the night, like a spark crackling serpentine along dry leaves to sudden flame. A
thought of Nevil and a regret had done it.
 

                                  Chapter VIII

                            A Night on the Adriatic

The lovers met after Roland had spoken to his sister - not exactly to advocate
the cause of Nevil, though he was under the influence of that grave night's walk
with him, but to sound her and see whether she at all shared Nevil's view of her
situation. Roland felt the awfulness of a French family arrangement of a
marriage, and the impertinence of a foreign Cupid's intrusion, too keenly to
plead for his friend: at the same time he loved his friend and his sister, and
would have been very ready to smile blessings on them if favourable
circumstances had raised a signal; if, for example, apoplexy or any other
cordial ex machinâ intervention had removed the middle-aged marquis; and,
perhaps, if Renée had shown the repugnance to her engagement which Nevil
declared she must have in her heart, he would have done more than smile; he
would have laid the case deferentially before his father. His own opinion was
that young unmarried women were incapable of the passion of love, being, as it
were, but half