Yours is a colder century than was ours, my dears. Your art has tempered
love and passion into sentiment, and hate you have learned to call
aversion or dislike. But we of that simple-hearted elder time were more
downright; and I have writ the word I mean in saying that my love was at
the mercy of this fiend.

I know not how it is or why, but there are men who have this gift--some
winning way to turn a woman's head or touch her heart; and I knew well
this gift was his. 'Twas not his face, for that was something less than
handsome, to my fancy; nor yet his figure, though that was big and
soldierly enough. It was rather in some subtlety of manner, some power
of simulation whereby in any womanly heart he seemed to stand at will
for that which he was not.

As I have said, I knew him well enough; knew him incapable of love apart
from passion, and that to him there was no sacredness in maiden chastity
or wifely vows. So he but gained his end he cared no whit what followed
after; ruin, broken hearts, lost souls, a man slain now and then to keep
the scale from tipping--all were as one to him, or to the Francis
Falconnet I knew.

And touching marriage, with Margery or any other, I feared that love
would have no word to say. Passion there might be, and that fierce
desire to have and wear which burns like any miser's fever in the blood;
but never love as lovers measure it. Why, then, had he proposed to
Margery? The answer did not tarry. Since he was now but a gentleman
volunteer it was plain that he had squandered his estate, and so might
brook the marriage chain if it were linked up with my father's acres.

It was a bait to lure such a gamester strongly. As matters stood with us