e aversion to anything and
everything "thrilling," the present writer can only say in plainest
prose that this incident made the young marquis the grateful friend of
his deliverer, Henry Stevens, who happened to be a zealous Methodist,
and about his own age.

The effort of the two friends to hold intercourse was a curious
spectacle. Not only did they speak different languages, but they lived
in different worlds. Not only did D'Entremont speak a very limited
English, while Stevens spoke no French, but D'Entremont's life and
thought had nothing in common with the life of Stevens, except the one
thing that made a friendship possible. They were both generous, manly
men, and each felt a strong drawing to the other. So it came about that
when they tired of the marquis's English and of the gulf between their
ideas, they used to call on Priscilla at her home with her mother in
the outskirts of the village. She was an interpreter indeed! For with
the keenest sympathy she entered into the world in which the marquis
lived, which had always been a sort of intellectual paradise to her. It
was strange indeed to meet a living denizen of a world that seemed to
her impossible except in books. And as for the sphere in which Stevens
moved, it was her own. He and she had been schoolmates from childhood,
had looked on the same green hills, known the same people, been molded
of the same strong religious feeling. Nothing was more delightful to
D'Entremont than to be able to talk to Stevens, unless it was to have
so good an excuse for conversation with Priscilla; and nothing was so
pleasant to Henry Stevens as to be able to understand the marquis,
unless it was to talk with Priscilla; while to Priscilla those were
golden moments, in which she passed like a quick-winged messenger
between her own native world and the world that she knew only in books,
between the soul of one friend and that of another. And thus grew up a
triple friendship, a friendship afterward sorely tried. For how strange
it is that what brings together at one time may be a wall of division
at another.

I can not pretend to explain just how it came about. Doubtless Henry
Stevens's influence had something to do with it, though I feel sure
Priscilla's had more. Doubtless the marquis was naturally susceptible
to religions influences. Certain it is that the socialistic opinions,
never very deeply rooted, and at most but a reaction, disappeared, and
there came a religious sentim