She spoke to him of her joy at seeing him—she so lonely and lost in a foreign land, separated from all her friends and family,—not knowing indeed where they were; of the suffering and hardships she had passed through since they had left Gidding—hardships which had caused the fever of which she lay dying as she spoke. She had come to Paris after parting from her uncle in Brittany, where they had suffered much deprivation with the Lady Blount, and had been received into this convent, where she had meant to take the veil; but the fever grew upon her, and the physicians at last gave her no hope of recovery. There she had lain day after day, tended by the kind nuns with every care, yet growing weaker and more weary—longing for some voice or face of her own country or of former days. While she had been well enough to listen, the nuns had told her all the little scraps of news relating to her own countrymen and to the Queen which had reached them; but Inglesant’s arrival was not likely to be among these, and Mary had heard nothing of his being in Paris till the night before, when the kindly old nun, finding her a little better than usual, had thought to amuse her by speaking of the pleasant young Englishman who spoke French so well, and whose half foreign name she could easily remember, and who, Lord Cheney had told her, had been one of the most faithful servants of the poor murdered King. The start of the dying girl before her, her flushed face as she raised herself in bed and threw herself into her friend’s arms, entreating her that this old friend, the dearest friend she had ever known—ah! dearer now than ever—might be sent for at once while she had life and strength to speak to him, showed the nun that this was yet again a reacting of that old story that never tires a woman’s heart. The nuns were not strict—far from it—and, even had Mary already taken the veil, the sisters would have thought little blame of her even for remembering that once she dreamt of another bridegroom than the heavenly Spouse. The nun had promised to send early in the morning to Lord Cheney, who, no doubt, knew the abode of his friend; and Mary, as she finished telling all this in her low and weak speech, lay still and quiet, looking upon her friend almost with as calm and peaceful a glance of her absorbing eyes as when she had looked at him in the garden parlour at Gidding years ago. He himself said little; it was not his words she wanted, could he have spoken them. That he was there by her, looking up in her face, holding her hand, was quite enough. At last she said,— "And that mission to the Papist murderers, Johnny, you did not wish to bring them into England of your own accord or only as a plot of the Jesuits? Surely you were but the servant of one whom you could not discover."