“Only let us get safe out of this coil, Paul, and we will let my Prudence take the obstinate maid in hand,” said he, with an air that proclaimed all confidence in the result. “You must remember, dear old boy, the inevitable fetish which our French maids are wont to make out of obedience to parents—a fair and worshipful virtue, indeed, that obedience, but not one to exact the sacrifice of a woman’s life—and of what is yet more sacred to her. Prudence will make her understand some things that you could not.” I felt for his hand and gripped it. “You think I will win her?” I whispered. “And you will stand by me?” “For the latter question, how can you ask it?” he answered, with a hint of reproach in his voice. “I fear I should stand by you in the wrong, Paul, let alone when, as now, I count you much in the right. I have but to think of Prudence in like case, you see. For the former question—why, see, you have time and her own heart on your side. She may be obstinate in that blindness of hers; and you may make blunders with your ancient facility, cousin mine. But I call to mind that trick you ever had of holding on—the trick of the English bulldog which you used so to admire. It is a strange streak, that, in a star-worshipping, sonnet-writing, wonder-wise freak like you, and makes me often doubt whether your verses, much as I like them, can be poetry, after all. But it is a useful characteristic to have about you, and, to my mind, it means you’ll win.” “If the English don’t hang me for a spy,” said I. “Stuff!” grunted my cousin. “The maid will look to that.” Such was my confidence in my cousin Marc’s discernment that I went to sleep somewhat comforted. Chapter XXVII Dead Days and Withered Dreams But to me awaking in the raw of the morning, a prisoner, the comfort seemed less sure. All through the weary, soul-sapping weeks that followed, it paled and shrank, till nothing was left of it but a hopeless sort of obstinacy, so rooted in the central fibre-knots of my being that to the very teeth of fate my pulses still kept beating out the vow, “I _will_ win! I _will_ win!” For cheer, all my cousin’s sober and well-considered confidence could not keep that in my heart. Of Yvonne, I could get not one word directly. I saw her hand in the fact that nothing more was heard of the charge of “spy” against me. Yet this benefit had a bitterness in it, for I knew she must have done it through Anderson. Intolerably did that knowledge grate. Mother Pêche came daily to the wicket, but could never boast a message for my ear—and in this reticence of Yvonne’s I saw a hardness of resolve which made my heart sink. Father Fafard, too, came daily with food for me, and with many a little loving kindness; but of Yvonne he would not speak. Marc, one day, encountered him on the subject, but prevailed not at all, in so much that they two parted in some heat.