“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, Mistress Damaris Sedley sat upon the earth in a gown of rose-colored silk.  Across her knee, under her clasped hands, lay a light racket, for she had strayed this way from battledore and shuttlecock and the sprightly company of maids of honor and gentlemen pensioners engaged thereat.  She was a fair lady, of a clear pallor, with a red mouth very subtly charming, and dark eyes beneath level brows.  Her eyes had depths on depths:  to one player of battledore and shuttlecock they were merely large brown orbs; another might find in them worlds below worlds; a third, going deeper, might, Actaeon-like, surprise the bare soul.  A curiously wrought net of gold caught her dark hair in its meshes, and pearls were in her ears, and around the white column of her throat rising between the ruff’s gossamer walls.  She fingered the racket, idly listening the while for a foot-fall beyond her round of trees.  Hearing it at last, and taking it for her brother’s, she looked up with a proud and tender smile.

“Fie upon thee for a laggard, Henry!” she began:  “I warrant thy Captain meets not his Dione with so slow a step!” Then, seeing who stood before her, she left her seat between the oak roots and curtsied low.  “Sir Mortimer Ferne,” she said, and rising to her full height, met his eyes with that deeper gaze of hers.