“What nobler knight-errantry?” said Frank, cheerfully; but Mrs. Leigh shuddered.

“What!  Frank too?” she said, half to herself; but her sons knew what she meant.  Amyas’s warlike life, honorable and righteous as she knew it to be, she had borne as a sad necessity:  but that Frank as well should become “a man of blood,” was more than her gentle heart could face at first sight.  That one youthful duel of his he had carefully concealed from her, knowing her feeling on such matters.  And it seemed too dreadful to her to associate that gentle spirit with all the ferocities and the carnage of a battlefield.  “And yet,” said she to herself, “is this but another of the self-willed idols which I must renounce one by one?” And then, catching at a last hope, she answered—­

“Frank must at least ask the queen’s leave to go; and if she permits, how can I gainsay her wisdom?”

And so the conversation dropped, sadly enough.

But now began a fresh perplexity in Frank’s soul, which amused Amyas at first, when it seemed merely jest, but nettled him a good deal when he found it earnest.  For Frank looked forward to asking the queen’s permission for his voyage with the most abject despondency and terror.  Two or three days passed before he could make up his mind to ask for an interview with her; and he spent the time in making as much interest with Leicester, Hatton, and Sidney, as if he were about to sue for a reprieve from the scaffold.

So said Amyas, remarking, further, that the queen could not cut his head off for wanting to go to sea.

“But what axe so sharp as her frown?” said Frank in most lugubrious tone.

Amyas began to whistle in a very rude way.

“Ah, my brother, you cannot comprehend the pain of parting from her.”

“No, I can’t.  I would die for the least hair of her royal head, God bless it! but I could live very well from now till Doomsday without ever setting eyes on the said head.”

“Plato’s Troglodytes regretted not that sunlight which they had never beheld.”

Amyas, not understanding this recondite conceit, made no answer to it, and there the matter ended for the time.  But at last Frank obtained his audience; and after a couple of hours’ absence returned quite pale and exhausted.

“Thank Heaven, it is over!  She was very angry at first—­what else could she be?—­and upbraided me with having set my love so low.  I could only answer, that my fatal fault was committed before the sight of her had taught me what was supremely lovely, and only worthy of admiration.  Then she accused me of disloyalty in having taken an oath which bound me to the service of another than her.  I confessed my sin with tears, and when she threatened punishment, pleaded that the offence had avenged itself heavily already,—­for what worse punishment than exile from the sunlight of her presence, into the outer darkness which reigns where she is not?