Those of the company to whom had never before been exhibited these samples of imperial riches craned their necks, and the looks of some were musing and of others keenly eager.  The room fell silent, and still they gazed and gazed at the small heap of glistening stones and those few grains of gold.  They were busy men in the vanguard of a quickened age, and theirs were its ardors, its Argus-eyed fancy and potent imagination.  Show them an acorn, and straightway they saw a forest of oaks; an inch of a rainbow, and the mind grasped the whole vast arch, zenith-reaching, seven-colored, enclosing far horizons.  So now, in addition to the gleaming fragments upon the table before them, they saw mountain ranges with ledges of rock all sparkling like this ore, deep mines with Indian workers, pack-trains, and burdened holds of ships.

After a time one lifted a piece of the ore, hesitatingly, as though he made to take up all the Indies, scrutinized it closely, weighed it, passed it to his neighbor.  It went the round of the company, each man handling it, each with the talisman between his fingers gazing through the bars of this present hour at a pageant and phantasmagoria of his own creating.  At last it came to the hand of an old merchant, who held it a moment or two, looking steadfastly upon it, then slowly put it down.

“Well,” said he, “may God send you furthering winds, Sir Mortimer and Sir John, and make their galleons and galliasses, their caravels and carracks, as bowed corn before you!  Those of your company who are to die, may they die cleanly, and those who are to live, live nobly, and may not one of you fall into the hands of the Holy Office.”

“Amen to that, Master Hudson,” quoth Arden.

“The Holy Office!” cried a Banbury man.  “I had a cousin, sirs,—­an honest fellow, with whom I had gone bird’s-nesting when we were boys together!  He was master of a merchantman—­the Red Lion—­that by foul treachery was taken by the Spaniards at Cales.  The priests put forth their hands and clutched him, who was ever outspoken, ever held fast to his own opinion!...  To die! that is easy; but when I learned what was done to him before he was let to die—­” The speaker broke off with an oath and sat with fixed gaze, his hand beating upon the table a noiseless tattoo.

“To die,” said Mortimer Ferne slowly.  “To die cleanly, having lived nobly—­it is a good wish, Master Hudson!  To die greatly—­as did your cousin, sir,—­a good knight and true, defending faith and loyalty, what more consummate flower for crown of life?  What loftier victory, supremer triumph?  Pain of body, what is it?  Let the body cry out, so that it betray not the mind, cheat not the soul into a remediless prison of perdition and shame!”