But why did Amyas wish to increase the distance between himself and Ayacanora?  Many reasons might be given:  I deny none of them.  But the main one, fantastic as it may seem, was simply, that while she had discovered herself to be an Englishwoman, he had discovered her to be a Spaniard.  If her father were seven times John Oxenham (and even that the perverse fellow was inclined to doubt), her mother was a Spaniard—­Pah! one of the accursed race; kinswoman—­perhaps, to his brother’s murderers!  His jaundiced eyes could see nothing but the Spanish element in her; or, indeed, in anything else.  As Cary said to him once, using a cant phrase of Sidney’s, which he had picked up from Frank, all heaven and earth were “spaniolated,” to him.  He seemed to recollect nothing but that Heaven had “made Spaniards to be killed, and him to kill them.”  If he had not been the most sensible of John Bulls, he would certainly have forestalled the monomania of that young Frenchman of rank, who, some eighty years after him, so maddened his brain by reading of the Spanish cruelties, that he threw up all his prospects and turned captain of filibusters in the West Indies, for the express purpose of ridding them of their tyrants; and when a Spanish ship was taken, used to relinquish the whole booty to his crew, and reserve for himself only the pleasure of witnessing his victims’ dying agonies.

But what had become of that bird-like song of Ayacanora’s which had astonished them on the banks of the Meta, and cheered them many a time in their anxious voyage down the Magdalena?  From the moment that she found out her English parentage, it stopped.  She refused utterly to sing anything but the songs and psalms which she picked up from the English.  Whether it was that she despised it as a relic of her barbarism, or whether it was too maddening for one whose heart grew heavier and humbler day by day, the nightingale notes were heard no more.

So homeward they ran, before a favoring southwest breeze:  but long ere they were within sight of land, Lucy Passmore was gone to her rest beneath the Atlantic waves.

CHAPTER XXVIII

HOW AMYAS CAME HOME THE THIRD TIME

“It fell about the Martinmas,
When nights were lang and mirk,
That wife’s twa sons cam hame again,
And their hats were o’ the birk.

“It did na graw by bush or brae,
Nor yet in ony shough;
But by the gates o’ paradise
That birk grew fair eneugh.”

The Wife of Usher’s Well.

It is the evening of the 15th of February, 1587, and Mrs. Leigh (for we must return now to old scenes and old faces) is pacing slowly up and down the terrace-walk at Burrough, looking out over the winding river, and the hazy sand-hills, and the wide western sea, as she has done every evening, be it fair weather or foul, for three weary years.  Three years and more are past and gone, and yet no news of Frank and Amyas,