The country-people in the neighbourhood of Greenlands were ready to receive M. de Bergerac with open arms: but he did not often avail himself of their friendly hospitality. He was serenely happy among his books and manuscripts, in the chamber which his friend had beautified for him, and had no thought of seeking any other kind of happiness. The great scheme of his life, the very beginning and end of his existence, was the completion of a book which was to supply an existing void in the world of books. To this achievement he devoted his days and nights, choosing all his reading with reference to his one great scheme. The subject possessed unfailing fascination for the mind of the scholar. It was an inexhaustible quarry, rich with gems of purest water; and De Bergerac dug patiently for the precious jewels, content to let the years slip past him unmarked, save by the slow growth of his mighty treatise. When the work seemed ripening, and the hour of its completion near at hand, the scholar trembled, for he remembered Gibbon’s walk in the moonlit garden at Lausanne, and the desolation which came down upon the worker when he felt that his task was finished. Happily, the hour of completion, which De Bergerac dreaded, was very slow to come. There was an end to the history of ancient Rome; but it appeared, at times, as if there could be no end to the history of superstition. The exile had passed his fortieth birthday, and had been but six months in England, when he married a fair young English girl--in a fit of absence of mind, said the ignorant, who tried to account for this unexpected alliance. But Harold Jerningham fathomed the secret of his friend’s marriage. The girl was the daughter of a curate, an old Orientalist, of whose reading De Bergerac had gladly availed himself for his beloved work, and in whose pleasant cottage he had therefore been a constant visitor. The curate’s daughter had been charmed out of the dullness of her life by the society of the courteous exile; and from looking up to him with reverential tenderness as a mentor and friend, she had unconsciously grown to regard him with a deeper and more tender feeling than that gentle, womanly friendship. A tone, a look, an imperceptible something not to be defined by words, revealed this feeling to De Bergerac before the girl was fully aware of it herself; and could he be less than grateful, this exile of forty? could his own heart fail to yield to so insidious and innocent an attack? Hence arose this marriage, which was so great a wonder to those who had only a superficial knowledge of the Frenchman’s character.