some of the leaves.

The study of the books to school Renee 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. Renee 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. Renee 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