Campion’s share in her guardianship had not been onerous, although it was necessarily maintained; for the child had inherited, and what small property would come to her was in England, and in English funds. To Hortense Letêtre and her brother such responsibilities in an alien land were not for a moment to be entertained. And gradually, this connection, at first formal and impersonal, between Campion and the Breton presbytery, had developed into an intimacy, into a friendship singularly satisfying on both sides. Separate as their interests seemed, those of the French country-priest, and of the Englishman of letters, famous already in his own department, they had, nevertheless, much community of feeling apart from their common affection for a child. Now, for many years, he had been established in their good graces, so that it had become an habit with him to spend his holiday--it was often a very extended one--at Ploumariel; while to the Letêtres, as well as to Marie-Ursule herself, this annual sojourn of Campion’s had become the occasion of the year, the one event which pleasantly relieved the monotony of life in this remote village; though that, too, was a not unpleasant routine. Insensibly Campion had come to find his chief pleasure in consideration of this child of an old friend, whose gradual growth beneath influences which seemed to him singularly exquisite and fine, he had watched so long; whose future, now that her childhood, her schooldays at the convent had come to an end, threatened to occupy him with an anxiety more intimate than any which hitherto he had known. Marie-Ursule’s future! They had talked much of it that summer, the priest and the Englishman, who accompanied him in his long morning walks, through green lanes, and over white, dusty roads, and past fields perfumed with the pungently pleasant smell of the blood-red _sarrasin_, when he paid visits to the sick who lived on the outskirts of his scattered parish. Campion became aware then of an increasing difficulty in discussing this matter impersonally, in the impartial manner becoming a guardian. Odd thrills of jealousy stirred within him when he was asked to contemplate Marie-Ursule’s possible suitors. And yet, it was with a very genuine surprise, at least for the moment, that he met the Curé’s sudden pressing home of a more personal contingency--he took this freedom of an old friend with a shrewd twinkle in his eye, which suggested that all along this had been chiefly in his mind. “_Mon bon ami_, why should you not marry her yourself? That would please all of us so much.” And he insisted, with kindly insistence, on the propriety of the thing: dwelling on Campion’s established position, their long habit of friendship, his own and his sister’s confidence and esteem, taking for granted, with that sure insight which is the gift of many women and of most priests, that on the ground of affection alone the justification was too obvious to be pressed.