“And you really think it may get her; you really think I can manage it,” Jerry murmured, still examining the china cow. Jerry, more than ever, because he saw him as so remarkable, was depending upon him for sustainment. It would have been a comparatively easy matter for him to leap over the barriers and make off to the beloved. To wait, to hold on, was a different matter, and Giles knew a little turn of fear as he saw it. It was no good Jerry’s thinking that anyone else could hold on for him. “You can’t manage it unless you can count on yourself,” he now informed him. “There’s nobody else for you to count on. Alix is against you, and your mother is against you. It won’t be an easy thing to marry Alix. It’s not only as a dancing Nike you have to think of her. It’s as madame Vervier’s daughter, too.” “And as a Catholic. And as French,” Jerry murmured, setting down the cow to take up the cat. “You know she said—funny little darling—that the children would have to be Catholics. Not that I’d care a rap.—Only, it does somehow make everything more difficult.” “It certainly does. Alix has all her objections. Nothing could be more difficult,” Giles rather heavily assured him. “And as the English lover it’s up to me to overcome them; show her that I can carry her off in spite of them—in spite of herself—what? How would you like it if your children had to be Catholics?” Jerry very gloomily inquired. Giles did not have to reflect for long. “I should not like it at all. It’s one of the things I’d put up with if I were in love with Alix and she in love with me.” “Do you know, I almost wish you were,” Jerry now said, and he spoke from a sudden cloud of darkness. Giles paused. “Does that mean that you’ve given her up?” he inquired. “No, I’ve not given her up.” Jerry looked down at the china cat. “I’m going to try to live up to the part of the English lover. It’s only,” said Jerry, “that I see the difficulties.” CHAPTER IV Before Giles went back to Oxford a short letter came to Mrs. Bradley from Toppie saying that she was going to stay on in Bath for the present and that her determination to become a nun was unaltered. After that, for many weeks, he heard nothing more of her, and it was not until the end of June that he received a letter telling him that she was at Headington, staying with an old friend of her mother’s before entering her novitiate, and asking him to come and see her. The old friend lived in a little house sunken among the high walls and deep leafage of a garden, and the drawing-room, where Giles waited for Toppie, its long windows opening on a little lawn, seemed part of the garden, it was so full of flowers and sunlight.