“I know that at present I am no more to her than her father’s old friend,” he said, when he had told his story, and had discovered that M. de Bergerac was neither surprised nor shocked by the revelation; “but give me only sufficient time, and I may win that pure heart, which already half belongs to me by right of my affection for you. Earnest feeling in a man who is not quick to feel must count for something. Do not judge me by my past, Theodore. Dissever me from that past, if you can; for, as I live, I am a new man since I have loved your daughter. To love a creature so pure is a spiritual baptism. If I can win that innocent heart, you will not stand between me and happiness, will you, old friend?” “If you can win her heart, no; but I will not sacrifice my daughter, or persuade her. I will confess to you that the uncertainty of her future is a constant perplexity to me, and that I would gladly see that future secured. I will say even more than this; I will admit that I should be proud to see my only child allied to a race so distinguished as yours, the mistress of a home so splendid as your Greenlands yonder. But by no word of mine will I influence her to a step so solemn. The difference between your ages is greater than in the case of myself and my dear wife; but the world might possibly have augured ill for the result of our union. Again, I say, if you can win my child’s heart, I will not refuse you her hand.” This was all Mr. Jerningham desired. A reluctant bride, sacrificed on the altar of ambition, would have been no bride for him. He was too much a gentleman not to have recoiled from the brutality involved in such an union. All he desired was the liberty to woo and to win; to set his many gifts against that one obvious disadvantage of his fifty years, and to triumph in spite of that stumbling-block. “Time and I against any two,” said Philip II. of Spain. Mr. Jerningham’s chief reliance was on time; time, which might first render his society habitual, and then necessary, to Helen; time, which would familiarize her with the difference between their ages, until that difference would scarcely seem to exist; time, which by demonstrating his constancy and devotion, must in the end give him a claim upon Helen’s gratitude, a right to her compassion. Time might, perhaps, have done all this for Mr. Jerningham but for one small circumstance: the stake for which he was playing this patient game had already been won. It remained no more upon the table for gamblers to venture its winning. The girl’s innocent heart had been given unconsciously to a silent adorer; and while Harold Jerningham was hanging upon her looks and studying her careless words, all her tenderest thoughts and dreams were wafted across the Channel to the industrious exile clearing his way through the great jungle of Arianism, in the Imperial Library of Paris.