But I gained my end.  I led her to talk of the beautiful Marquise.  This is the tale.  Mr. Pollingray, when a very young man, and comparatively poor, went over to France with good introductions, and there saw and fell in love with Louise de Riverolles.  She reciprocated his passion.  If he would have consented to abjure his religion and worship with her, Madame de Riverolles, her mother, would have listened to her entreaties.  But Gilbert was firm.  Mr. Pollingray, I mean, refused to abandon his faith.  Her mother, consequently, did not interfere, and Monsieur de Riverolles, her father, gave her to the Marquis de Marzardouin, a roue young nobleman, immensely rich, and shockingly dissipated.  And she married him.  No, I cannot understand French girls.  Do as I will, it is quite incomprehensible to me how Louise, loving another, could suffer herself to be decked out in bridal finery and go to the altar and take the marriage oaths.  Not if perdition had threatened would I have submitted.  I have a feeling that Mr. Pollingray should have shown at least one year’s resentment at such conduct; and yet I admire him for his immediate generous forgiveness of her.  It was fatherly.  She was married at sixteen.  His forgiveness was the fruit of his few years’ seniority, said Miss Pollingray, whose opinion of the Marquise I cannot arrive at.  At any rate, they have been true and warm friends ever since, constantly together interchangeing visits.  That is why Mr. Pollingray has been more French than English for those long years.

Miss Pollingray concluded by asking me what I thought of the story.  I said:  ’It is very strange French habits are so different from ours.  I dare say . . .  I hope . . . , perhaps . . . indeed, Mr. Pollingray seems happy now.’  Her idea of my wits must be that they are of the schoolgirl order—­a perfect receptacle for indefinite impressions.

‘Ah!’ said she.  ‘Gilbert has burnt his heart to ashes by this time.’

I slept with that sentence in my brain.  In the morning, I rose and dressed, dreaming.  As I was turning the handle of my door to go down to breakfast, suddenly I swung round in a fit of tears.  It was so piteous to think that he should have waited by her twenty years in a slow anguish, his heart burning out, without a reproach or a complaint.  I saw him, I still see him, like a martyr.

‘Some people,’ Miss Pollingray said, I permitted themselves to think evil of my brother’s assiduous devotion to a married woman.  There is not a spot on his character, or on that of the person whom Gilbert loved.’

I would believe it in the teeth of calumny.  I would cling to my, belief in him if I were drowning.

I consider that those twenty years are just nothing, if he chooses to have them so.  He has lived embalmed in a saintly affection.  No wonder he considers himself still youthful.  He is entitled to feel that his future is before him.