the _Cygnet_ where she rode in the pale river, near to the _Phoenix_,
with the _Mere Honour_ and the _Marigold_ just beyond, and there came
over the boy a great homesickness for her decks. He crept as closely as
he might to her Captain, sitting there as quietly as if the teeming,
musky soil were good Devon earth, and that phosphorescent ocean the gray
waves of English seas, and he laid his hand upon Sir Mortimer's booted
knee, and so was somewhat comforted.

Upon Ferne, waiting in inaction, looking out over the vast, dim panorama
of earth and ocean, there fell, after the fever and exaltation, the
stress and exertion of the past hours, a strange mood of quiet, of
dreaming, and of peace. Sitting there in listless strength, he thought
in quietude and tenderness of other things than gold, and fame, and the
fortress which must be taken of Nueva Cordoba. With his eyes upon the
gleaming sea he thought of Damaris Sedley, and of Sidney, and of a day
at Windsor when the Queen had showed him much favor, and of a little,
windy knoll, near to his house of Ferne, where, returning from hunting
or hawking, he was wont to check his horse that he might taste the sweet
and sprightly air.

Now this man waited at the threshold of an opening door, and like a
child his fancy gathered door-step flowers, recking nothing of the
widening space behind, the beckoning hands, the strange chambers into
which shortly he must go. Some faint and far monition, some breath of
colder air may have touched him, for now, like a shriven man drowsing
into death, his mind dwelt lightly upon all things, gazed quietly upon a
wide, retreating landscape, and saw that great and small are one. He was
wont to think of Damaris Sedley with ardor, imagining embraces, kisses,
cries of love, sweet lips, warm arms,--but to-night he seemed to see her
in a glass, somewhat dimly. She stood a little remote, quiet, sweet, and