Three o’clock, upon a still pure bright midsummer morning.  A broad and yellow sheet of ribbed tide-sands, through which the shallow river wanders from one hill-foot to the other, whispering round dark knolls of rock, and under low tree-fringed cliffs, and banks of golden broom.  A mile below, the long bridge and the white walled town, all sleeping pearly in the soft haze, beneath a cloudless vault of blue.  The white glare of dawn, which last night hung high in the northwest, has travelled now to the northeast, and above the wooded wall of the hills the sky is flushing with rose and amber.

A long line of gulls goes wailing up inland; the rooks from Annery come cawing and sporting round the corner at Landcross, while high above them four or five herons flap solemnly along to find their breakfast on the shallows.  The pheasants and partridges are clucking merrily in the long wet grass; every copse and hedgerow rings with the voice of birds, but the lark, who has been singing since midnight in the “blank height of the dark,” suddenly hushes his carol and drops headlong among the corn, as a broad-winged buzzard swings from some wooded peak into the abyss of the valley, and hangs high-poised above the heavenward songster.  The air is full of perfume; sweet clover, new-mown hay, the fragrant breath of kine, the dainty scent of sea-weed wreaths and fresh wet sand.  Glorious day, glorious place, “bridal of earth and sky,” decked well with bridal garlands, bridal perfumes, bridal songs,—­What do those four cloaked figures there by the river brink, a dark spot on the fair face of the summer morn?

Yet one is as cheerful as if he too, like all nature round him, were going to a wedding; and that is Will Cary.  He has been bathing down below, to cool his brain and steady his hand; and he intends to stop Don Guzman Maria Magdalena Sotomayor de Soto’s wooing for ever and a day.  The Spaniard is in a very different mood; fierce and haggard, he is pacing up and down the sand.  He intends to kill Will Cary; but then?  Will he be the nearer to Rose by doing so?  Can he stay in Bideford?  Will she go with him?  Shall he stoop to stain his family by marrying a burgher’s daughter?  It is a confused, all but desperate business; and Don Guzman is certain but of one thing, that he is madly in love with this fair witch, and that if she refuse him, then, rather than see her accept another man, he would kill her with his own hands.

Sir Richard Grenville too is in no very pleasant humor, as St. Leger soon discovers, when the two seconds begin whispering over their arrangements.

“We cannot have either of them killed, Arthur.”

“Mr. Cary swears he will kill the Spaniard, sir.”

“He sha’n’t.  The Spaniard is my guest.  I am answerable for him to Leigh, and for his ransom too.  And how can Leigh accept the ransom if the man is not given up safe and sound?  They won’t pay for a dead carcass, boy!  The man’s life is worth two hundred pounds.”