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Now she could no longer avoid them, for two at least were frequent visitors to the house. Eustache de Champfort and Gilles de Périgault belonged to families that had lately settled at Eslede and Silvericke. They were handsome, well-born, well-mannered and well endowed with everything but money. De Champfort was a swarthy, dark-browed Southerner from the Condamine country near Nîmes. De Périgault was of a different type. Save that the modern fashion had shaved his chin he might have been one of the Protestant heroes of La Rochelle—those great, fair, blue-eyed, curly-bearded men that had sailed with Coligny. He wore his own hair in thick yellow curls and his eyes were blue and farseeing as a sailor's. They always looked beyond Gervase Alard's daughters, not one of whom could say he was looking at her, so that there were always teasings and squabblings about him.

With de Périgault and de Champfort sometimes came the latter's brother Etienne, also a changing group from Rye—Gasson, du Bois, Guiver, Mouat and others, less well-born than the young noblemen but more prosperous. As foils to these good-mannered, civilized foreigners came also at whiles the loutish son of the Squire of Redlonde and Bess's betrothed, Ned Oxenbrigge, with his old-fashioned doublet and breeches and his ceaseless talk of cock-fighting.