of the house; while she, poor fool, peeped after him out
of her window upstairs, and her heart sank within her as she watched his
jaunty and careless air.

How much of that rhapsody of his was honest, how much premeditated, I
cannot tell: though she, poor child, began to fancy that it was all a
set speech, when she found that he had really taken her at her word, and
set foot no more within her father's house. So she reproached herself
for the cruelest of women; settled, that if he died, she should be his
murderess; watched for him to pass at the window, in hopes that he might
look up, and then hid herself in terror the moment he appeared round
the corner; and so forth, and so forth:--one love-making is very like
another, and has been so, I suppose, since that first blessed marriage
in Paradise, when Adam and Eve made no love at all, but found it
ready-made for them from heaven; and really it is fiddling while Rome
is burning, to spend more pages over the sorrows of poor little Rose
Salterne, while the destinies of Europe are hanging on the marriage
between Elizabeth and Anjou: and Sir Humphrey Gilbert is stirring heaven
and earth, and Devonshire, of course, as the most important portion
of the said earth, to carry out his dormant patent, which will give to
England in due time (we are not jesting now) Newfoundland, Nova Scotia,
and Canada, and the Northern States; and to Humphrey Gilbert himself
something better than a new world, namely another world, and a crown of
glory therein which never fades away.

CHAPTER XI

HOW EUSTACE LEIGH MET THE POPE'S LEGATE

"Misguided, rash, intruding fool, farewell!
Thou see'st to be too busy is some danger."

Hamlet.

It is the spring of 1582-3. The gray March skies are curdling hard and
high above black mountain peaks. The keen March wind is sweeping harsh
and dry across a dreary sheet of bog, still red and yellow with the
stains of winter frost. One brown knoll alone breaks the waste, and on
it a few leafless wind-clipt oaks stretch their moss-grown arms, like
giant hairy spiders, above a desolate pool which crisps and shivers in
the biting breeze, while from beside its brink rises a mournful cry, and
sweeps down, faint and fitful, amid the howling of the wind.

Along the brink of the bog, picking their road among crumbling rocks and
green spongy springs, a company of English soldiers are pushing fast,
clad cap-a-pie in he