England for good--and he had six sons and daughters. And when he
died he was buried on his own land--and his effigy is on his tomb
--it was sculptured by himself. I used to put flowers on it, just
where his motto was carved--'Mon coeur me soutien.' For I--I was
brought up at Briar Farm... and I was quite fond of the Sieur
Amadis!"

She looked up with a serious, sweet luminance in her eyes--and he
was suddenly thrilled by her glance, and moved by a desire to turn
her romantic idyll into something of reality. This feeling was
merely the physical one of an amorously minded man,--he knew, or
thought he knew, women well enough to hold them at no higher
estimate than that of sex-attraction,--yet, with all the cynicism
he had attained through long experience of the world and its ways,
he recognised a charm in this fair little creature that was
strange and new and singularly fascinating, while the exquisite
modulations of her voice as she told the story of the old French
knight, so simply yet so eloquently, gave her words the tenderness
of a soft song well sung.

"A pity you should waste fondness on a man of stone!" he said,
lightly, bending his keen steel-blue eyes on hers. "But what you
tell me is most curious, for your 'Sieur Amadis' must be the
missing branch of my own ancestral tree. May I explain?--or will
it bore you?"

She gave him a swift, eager glance.

"Bore me?" she echoed--"How could it? Oh, do please let me know
everything--quickly!"