e of pursuing his accustomed sports,
conferred with the various agents of intrigue who from time to time
visited our coast; and to me the Abbe gave words of endearment and
affected the language of more entire trust. "Whatever," he would say,
"in our present half mellowed projects, is exposed to danger, but
does not promise reward, I entrust to Gerald; hereafter, far higher
employment, under far safer and surer auspices, will be yours. We are
the heads: be ours the nobler occupation to plan; and let us leave
to inferior natures the vain and perilous triumph to execute what we
design."

All this I readily assented to; for, despite my acquiescence in
Montreuil's wishes, I loved not enterprise, or rather I hated whatever
roused me from the dreamy and abstracted indolence which was most dear
to my temperament. Sometimes, however, with a great show of confidence,
Montreuil would request me to execute some quiet and unimportant
commission; and of this nature was one I received while I was thus,
unknown even to the object, steeping my soul in the first intoxication
of love. The plots then carried on by certain ecclesiastics I need
not say extended, in one linked chain, over the greater part of the
Continent. Spain, in especial, was the theatre of these intrigues;
and among the tools employed in executing them were some who, though
banished from that country, still, by the rank they had held in it,
carried a certain importance in their very names. Foremost of these
was the father of the woman I loved; and foremost, in whatever promised
occupation to a restless mind, he was always certain to be.

Montreuil now commissioned me to seek out a certain Barnard (an
underling in those secret practices or services, for which he afterwards
suffered, and who was then in that part of the country), and to
communicate to him some messages of which he was to be the bearer to
this Spaniard. A thought flashed upon me--Montreuil's letter mentioned,
accidentally, that the Spaniard had never hitherto seen Barnard: could I
not personate the latter, deliver the messages myself, and thus win that
introduction to the daughter which I so burningly desired, and which,
from the close reserve of the father's habits, I might not otherwise
effect? The plan was open to two objections: one, that I was known
personally in the town in the environs of which the Spaniard lived, and
he might therefore very soon discover who I really was; the other that
I was not