play-hours; and now I’ll be a little child once more, with the flowers, and the singing birds, and the silver fishes in the stream, that are at peace, and think no harm, and want neither clothes, nor money, nor knighthood, nor peerage, but just take what comes; and their heavenly Father feedeth them, and Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these—­and will He not much more feed us, that are of more value than many sparrows?”

“And will you live here, shut out from all Christian ordinances?”

“Christian ordinances?  Adam and Eve had no parsons in Paradise.  The Lord was their priest, and the Lord was their shepherd, and He’ll be ours too.  But go your ways, sir, and send up Sir John Brimblecombe, and let him marry us here Church fashion (though we have sworn troth to each other before God already), and let him give us the Holy Sacrament once and for all, and then read the funeral service over us, and go his ways, and count us for dead, sir—­for dead we are to the wicked worthless world we came out of three years ago.  And when the Lord chooses to call us, the little birds will cover us with leaves, as they did the babies in the wood, and fresher flowers will grow out of our graves, sir, than out of yours in that bare Northam churchyard there beyond the weary, weary, weary sea.”

His voice died away to a murmur, and his head sank on his breast.

Amyas stood spell-bound.  The effect of the narcotic was all but miraculous in his eyes.  The sustained eloquence, the novel richness of diction in one seemingly drowned in sensual sloth, were, in his eyes, the possession of some evil spirit.  And yet he could not answer the Evil One.  His English heart, full of the divine instinct of duty and public spirit, told him that it must be a lie:  but how to prove it a lie?  And he stood for full ten minutes searching for an answer, which seemed to fly farther and farther off the more he sought for it.

His eye glanced upon Ayacanora.  The two girls were whispering to her smilingly.  He saw one of them glance a look toward him, and then say something, which raised a beautiful blush in the maiden’s face.  With a playful blow at the speaker, she turned away.  Amyas knew instinctively that they were giving her the same advice as Ebsworthy had given to him.  Oh, how beautiful she was!  Might not the renegades have some reason on their side after all.

He shuddered at the thought:  but he could not shake it off.  It glided in like some gaudy snake, and wreathed its coils round all his heart and brain.  He drew back to the other side of the lawn, and thought and thought—­

Should he ever get home?  If he did, might he not get home a beggar?  Beggar or rich, he would still have to face his mother, to go through that meeting, to tell that tale, perhaps, to hear those reproaches, the forecast of which had weighed on him like a dark thunder-cloud for two weary years; to wipe out which by some desperate deed of glory he had wandered the wilderness, and wandered in vain.