“I have none.”

“None?”

“I have imagined twenty different ones in the last hour; but all are equally uncertain, impossible.  I have ceased to struggle—­I go where I am called, love’s willing victim.  If Heaven accept the sacrifice, it will provide the altar and the knife.”

Aymas was at his wits’ end.  Judging of his brother by himself, he had taken for granted that Frank had some well-concocted scheme for gaining admittance to the Rose; and as the wiles of love were altogether out of his province, he had followed in full faith such a sans-appel as he held Frank to be.  But now he almost doubted of his brother’s sanity, though Frank’s manner was perfectly collected and his voice firm.  Amyas, honest fellow, had no understanding of that intense devotion, which so many in those days (not content with looking on it as a lofty virtue, and yet one to be duly kept in its place by other duties) prided themselves on pampering into the most fantastic and self-willed excesses.

Beautiful folly! the death-song of which two great geniuses were composing at that very moment, each according to his light.  For, while Spenser was embalming in immortal verse all that it contained of noble and Christian elements, Cervantes sat, perhaps, in his dungeon, writing with his left hand Don Quixote, saddest of books, in spite of all its wit; the story of a pure and noble soul, who mistakes this actual life for that ideal one which he fancies (and not so wrongly either) eternal in the heavens:  and finding instead of a battlefield for heroes in God’s cause, nothing but frivolity, heartlessness, and godlessness, becomes a laughing-stock,—­and dies.  One of the saddest books, I say again, which man can read.

Amyas hardly dare trust himself to speak, for fear of saying too much; but he could not help saying—­

“You are going to certain death, Frank.”

“Did I not entreat,” answered he, very quietly, “to go alone?”

Amyas had half a mind to compel him to return:  but he feared Frank’s obstinacy; and feared, too, the shame of returning on board without having done anything; so they went up through the wicket-gate, along a smooth turf walk, into what seemed a pleasure-garden, formed by the hand of man, or rather of woman.  For by the light, not only of the moon, but of the innumerable fireflies, which flitted to and fro across the sward like fiery imps sent to light the brothers on their way, they could see that the bushes on either side, and the trees above their heads, were decked with flowers of such strangeness and beauty, that, as Frank once said of Barbados, “even the gardens of Wilton were a desert in comparison.”  All around were orange and lemon trees (probably the only addition which man had made to Nature’s prodigality), the fruit of which, in that strange colored light of the fireflies, flashed in their eyes like balls of burnished gold and emerald; while great white tassels swinging from every tree in the breeze which swept down the glade, tossed in their faces a fragrant snow of blossoms, and glittering drops of perfumed dew.