Three months afterwards George Gering was joyfully preparing to take
two voyages. Perhaps, indeed, his keen taste for the one had much to do
with his eagerness for the other--though most men find getting gold as
cheerful as getting married. He had received a promise of marriage from
Jessica, and he was also soon to start with William Phips for the
Spaniards' country. His return to New York with the news of the capture
of the Hudson's Bay posts brought consternation. There was no angrier
man in all America than Colonel Richard Nicholls; there was perhaps no
girl in all the world more agitated than Jessica, then a guest at
Government House. Her father was there also, cheerfully awaiting her
marriage with Gering, whom, since he had lost most traces of Puritanism,
he liked. He had long suspected the girl's interest in Iberville; if he
had known that two letters from him--unanswered--had been treasured,
read, and re-read, he would have been anxious. That his daughter should
marry a Frenchman--a filibustering seigneur, a Catholic, the enemy of the
British colonies, whose fellow-countrymen incited the Indians to harass
and to massacre--was not to be borne.

Besides, the Honourable Hogarth Leveret, whose fame in the colony was now
often in peril because of his Cavalier propensities, and whose losses had
aged him, could not bear that he should sink and carry his daughter with
him. Jessica was the apple of his eye; for her he would have borne all,
sorts of trials; but he could not bear to see her called on to bear them.
Like most people out of the heyday of their own youth, he imagined the
way a maid's fancy ought to go.

If he had known how much his daughter's promise to marry Gering would
cost her, he would not have had it. But indeed she did not herself guess
it. She had, with the dreamy pleasure of a young girl, dwelt upon an
event which might well hold her delighted memory: distance, difference