"Victoria, if your spirit should withdraw from me, I would be like a body without a soul—accordingly, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I know that that promise must cost you a good deal, poor woman. And yet," added the captain with his habitual good nature, "do not run away with the idea that I am so foolishly vainglorious as to imagine that it is to the strong bull of a warrior, named Marion, that Victoria the Great makes the sacrifice of burying her grief in order to guide him. No—no. It is to our old Gaul that she renders the sacrifice. As a good son of my country, I am as thankful for the kind act done to my mother, as if it were done to myself."
"Nobly thought and nobly said, Marion," replied Victoria deeply touched by these words of the captain. "Nevertheless, your straightforwardness and sound judgment will soon enable you to dispense with my advice; then," added she with an expression of profound pain that she strove to repress, "I shall be able, like you, Tetrik, to retire and bury myself in some secluded spot with my sorrows."
"Alas," replied the governor, "to weep in peace is the only consolation for irreparable losses." "But," he proceeded, addressing the captain, "you referred to two conditions. Victoria has accepted the first; which is the second?"
"Oh! As to the second, it is as important to me as the first," and the captain shook his head. "Aye, it is as important as the first—"
"And what is it?" asked my foster-sister. "Explain yourself, Marion."
"I know not," replied the good captain with a naïve and embarrassed mien, "I know not whether I ever spoke to you of my friend Eustace."
"Yes, and more than once," replied Tetrik. "But what has your friend Eustace to do with your new functions?"
"What!" cried Captain Marion, "you ask me what my friend Eustace has to do with me—you might as well ask what has the sheath of the sword to do with the blade, the hammer with the handle, the bellows with the forge."
"You are, in short, bound together by an old and close friendship; we know it," said Victoria. "Would you desire, captain, to accord some favor to your friend?"
"I shall never consent to be separated from him. True enough, he is not of a gay disposition; he is habitually sullen, often peevish. Still, he loves me as I do him, and we can not do without each other. Now, then, it may be considered surprising that the Chief of Gaul should have a common soldier, a former blacksmith, for his intimate friend and chum. But as I said to you, Victoria, if I must be separated from my friend Eustace, the plan falls through—I decline. Only his friendship can render the burden supportable to me."