It was a bait to lure such a gamester strongly.  As matters stood with us in that wan summer of exhaustion and defeat, the king’s cause waxed and grew more hopeful day by day.  And in event of final victory a landless baronet, marrying Margery’s dower of Appleby Hundred, might snap his fingers at the Jews who, haply, had driven him forth from England.

And as for Margery?  Truly, she had told me, or as good as told me, that her maiden love had pledged itself a pawn for Jennifer’s redeeming.  But there be other things than love to sway a woman’s will.  This volunteer captain with the winning way was of the haute noblesse, and he could make her Lady Falconnet.  Moreover, he was with her day by day; and you may mark this as you will; that a present suitor hath ever the trump cards to play against the absent lover.

So, brooding over this, I wore out two most dismal days—­the first in many I had had to pass alone.  But on the morning of the third the sky was lightened, though then the light was but a flash and darkness followed quickly after.  She came again and brought me a visitor; it was this same Father Matthieu with whom she had jestingly compared me, and lest I should take my punishment too lightly, stayed but to make the good priest known to me.

Now I was born and bred an heretic, by any papist’s reckoning, but I have ever held it witless in that man who lets a creed obstruct a friendship.  Moreover, this sweet-faced cleric was the friendliest of men; friendly, and yet the wiliest Jesuit of them all, since he read me at a glance and fell straightway to praising Margery.

“A truly sweet young demoiselle,” he said, by way of foreword, no sooner was the door closed behind her, and while he preached a sermon on this text I grew to know and love him.

He was a little man, as bone and muscle go, with deep-set eyes, and features kind and mild and fine as any woman’s; some such face as Leonardo gave St. John, could that have been less youthful.  I could not tell his order, though from his well-worn cassock girded at the waist with a frayed bit of hempen cord he might have been a Little Brother of the Poor.  But this I noted; that he was not tonsured, and his white hair, soft and fine as Margery’s, was like an aureole to the finely chiseled features.  As missionary men of any creed are apt, he looked far older than he really was; and when he came to tell me of his life among the Indians, it was patent how the years had multiplied upon him.

I listened, well enough content to learn him better by his own report.

“But you must find it thankless work; this gospeling in the wilderness,” I ventured, when all was said. “’Tis but a hermit’s life for any man of parts; and after all, when you have done your utmost, your converts are but savages, as they were.”

At this he smiled and shook his head. "Non, Monsieur, not so.  You are a soldier and can not see beyond your point of sword. Mais, mon ami, they have souls to save, these poor children of the forest, and they are far more sinned against than sinning.  I find them kind and true and faithful; and some of them are noble, in their way.”