He proceeded to tell how he had accompanied the Jesuit fathers, on their leaving London, to the great English seminary at Douai, and being for the time convinced by them that his feelings towards Anne were a delusion of the enemy, he had studied with all his might, and as health and monotony of life began to have their accustomed effect in rousing the restlessness and mischievousness of his nature, with all the passions of manhood growing upon him, he strove to force them down by fasting and scourging.  He told, in a bitter, almost savage way, of his endeavours to flog his demon out of himself, and of his anger and disappointment at finding Piers Pilgrim in the seminary of Douai, quite as subject to his attacks as ever was Perry Oakshott under a sermon of Mr. Horncastle’s.

Then came the information among the students that the governor of the city, the Marquis de Nidemerle, had brought some English gentlemen and ladies to visit the gardens.  As most of the students were of British families there was curiosity as to who they were, and thus Peregrine heard that one was young Archfield of the Hampshire family, with his tutor, and the lady was Mistress Darpent, daughter to a French lawyer, who had settled in England after the Fronde.  Anne’s name had not transpired, for she was viewed merely as an attendant.  Peregrine had been out on some errand in the town, and had a distant view of his enemy as he held him, flaunting about with a fine lady on his arm, forgetting the poor little pretty wife whom no doubt he had frightened to death.”

“Oh! you little know how tenderly he speaks of her.”

“Tenderly!—­that’s the way they speak of me at Oakwood, eh?  Human, not to say elf, nature, could not withstand giving the fellow a start.  I sped off, whipped into the Church, popped into a surplice I found ready to hand, caught up a candle, and!—­Little did I think who it was that was hanging on his arm.  So little did I know it that my heart began to be drawn to St. Germain, where I still imagined you.  Altogether, after that prank, all broke out again.  I entertained the lads with a few more freaks, for which I did ample penance, but it grew on me that in my case all was a weariness and a sham, and that my demon might get a worse hold of me if I got into a course of hypocrisy.  They were very good to me, those fathers, but Jesuits as they were, I doubt whether they ever fathomed me.  Any way, perhaps they thought I should be a scandal, but they agreed with me that their order was not my vocation, and that we had better part before my fiend drove me to do so with dishonour.  They even gave me recommendations to the French officers that were besieging Tournay.  I knew the Duke of Berwick a little at Portsmouth, and it ended in my becoming under-secretary to the Duke of Chartres.  A man who knows languages has his value among Frenchmen, who despise all but their own.”