"But--but--" stammered Sedley.

Sir Mortimer laughed. "'But ... Dione!' you would say. 'Ah, faithless
poet, forsworn knight!' you would say. Not so, my friend." He looked far
away with shining eyes. "That unknown nymph, that lady whom I praise in
verse, whose poet I am, that Dione at whose real name you all do vainly
guess--it is thy sister, lad! Nay,--she knows me not for her worshipper,
nor do I know that I can win her love. I would try ..."

Sedley's smooth cheek glowed and his eyes shone. He was young; he loved
his sister, orphaned like himself and the neglected ward of a decaying
house; while to his ardent fancy the man above him, superb in his violet
dress, courteous and excellent in all that he did, was a very Palmerin
or Amadis de Gaul. Now, impetuously, he put his hand upon that other
hand touching his shoulder, and drew it to his lips in a caress, of
which, being Elizabethans, neither was at all ashamed. In the dark,
deeply fringed eyes that he raised to his leader's face there was a
boyish and poetic adoration for the sea-captain, the man of war who was
yet a courtier and a scholar, the violet knight who was to lead him up
the heights which long ago the knight himself had scaled.

"Damaris is a fair maid, and good and learned," he said in a whisper,
half shy, half eager. "May you dream as you wish, Sir Mortimer! For the
way to the covert--'tis by yonder path that's all in sunshine."



II

Beneath a great oak-tree, where light and shadow made a checkered round,