"But you have resources which should make such a sacrifice easy."
"No, you are mistaken. I am ruined, entirely ruined!"
His agitation was so great that he forgot to dissimulate.
"But the fortune of your father was very large, and cannot be exhausted."
"But I was robbed of that!"
Fernando rose from his chair.
"Permit me," he said, "to decline to enter into any affairs foreign to the matters we have under consideration. I came to offer you peace or war. Peace means fortune and power, and war—"
"War!" repeated Fongereues, "I do not understand you."
"When the Society proposes a compact, when, as I have just done to you, she unveils her secret designs, she holds in reserve a weapon which places at her mercy the man of whom she wished to make an ally, and whom she does not choose to have for an adversary."
"I! I an adversary of the Society of Jesus! You cannot mean what you say."