The company had finished dining, for the table was covered with fruits and comfits, and wine in silver goblets.  There was sack and madeira, and French claret, and white Rhenish, and ale and cider for those with homelier palates.  I saw dimly around me the faces of the guests, for the few candles scarcely illumined the dusk of the great panelled hall hung with dark portraits.  One man gave me good-evening, but as I sat at the extreme end of the table I was out of the circle of the company.  They talked and laughed, and it seemed to me that I could hear women’s voices at the other end.  Meantime I was busy with my viands, and no man ever punished a venison pie more heartily.  As I ate and drank, I smiled at the strangeness of my fortunes—­to come thus straight from the wild seas and the company of outlaws into a place of silver and damask and satin coats and lace cravats and orderly wigs.  The soft hum of gentlefolks’ speech was all around me, those smooth Virginian voices compared with which my Scots tongue was as strident as a raven’s.  But as I listened, I remembered Ringan and Lawrence, and, “Ah, my silken friends,” thought I, “little you know the judgment that is preparing.  Some day soon, unless God is kind, there will be blood on the lace and the war-whoop in these pleasant chambers.”

Then a voice said louder than the rest, “Dulcinea will sing to us.  She promised this morning in the garden.”

At this there was a ripple of “Bravas,” and presently I heard the tuning of a lute.  The low twanging went on for a little, and suddenly I was seized with a presentiment.  I set down my tankard, and waited with my heart in my mouth.

Very clear and pure the voice rose, as fresh as the morning song of birds.  There was youth in it and joy and pride—­joy of the fairness of the earth, pride of beauty and race and strength, “My dear and only love” it sang, as it had sung before; but then it had been a girl’s hope, and now it was a woman’s certainty.  At the first note, the past came back to me like yesterday.  I saw the moorland gables in the rain, I heard the swirl of the tempest, I saw the elfin face in the hood which had cheered the traveller on his way.  In that dim light I could not see the singer, but I needed no vision.  The strangeness of the thing clutched at my heart, for here was the voice which had never been out of my ears singing again in a land far from the wet heather and the driving mists of home.

As I sat dazed and dreaming, I knew that a great thing had befallen me.  For me, Andrew Garvald, the prosaic trader, coming out of the darkness into this strange company, the foundations of the world had been upset.  All my cares and hopes, my gains and losses, seemed in that moment no better than dust.  Love had come to me like a hurricane.  From now I had but the one ambition, to hear that voice say to me and to mean it truly, “My dear and only love.”  I knew it was folly and a madman’s dream, for