"We must wait, we must wait still," said the Vicar. "Time will find a friend." Cydaria had become pensive for a moment, but she looked up now, smiling again, and said to me: "You'll soon have a friend in London." Thinking of Barbara, I answered gloomily, "She's no friend of mine." "I did not mean whom you mean," said Cydaria, with twinkling eyes and not a whit put out. "But I also am going to London." I smiled, for it did not seem as though she would be a powerful friend, or able to open any way for me. But she met my smile with another so full of confidence and challenge that my attention was wholly caught, and I did not heed the Vicar's farewell as he rose and left us. "And would you serve me," I asked, "if you had the power?" "Nay, put the question as you think it," said she. "Would you have the power to serve me if you had the will? Is not that the doubt in your mind?" "And if it were?" "Then, indeed, I do not know how to answer; but strange things happen there in London, and it may be that some day even I should have some power." "And you would use it for me?" "Could I do less on behalf of a gentleman who has risked his mistress's favour for my poor cheek's sake?" And she fell to laughing again, her mirth growing greater as I turned red in the face. "You mustn't blush when you come to town," she cried, "or they'll make a ballad on you, and cry you in the streets for a monster." "The oftener comes the cause, the rarer shall the effect be," said I. "The excuse is well put," she conceded. "We should make a wit of you in town." "What do you in town?" I asked squarely, looking her full in the eyes. "Perhaps, sometimes," she laughed, "what I have done once--and to your good knowledge--since I came to the country."