“You have not hurt the maiden, my son?  I thought I heard a scream.”

“Hurt her!  No.  Would God that she were dead, nevertheless, and I by her!  Say no more to me, father.  We will home.”  Even Campian knew enough of the world to guess what had happened, and they both hurried home in silence.

And so Eustace Leigh played his move, and lost it.

Poor little Rose, having run nearly to Chapel, stopped for very shame, and walked quietly by the cottages which stood opposite the gate, and then turned up the lane towards Moorwinstow village, whither she was bound.  But on second thoughts, she felt herself so “red and flustered,” that she was afraid of going into the village, for fear (as she said to herself) of making people talk, and so, turning into a by-path, struck away toward the cliffs, to cool her blushes in the sea-breeze.  And there finding a quiet grassy nook beneath the crest of the rocks, she sat down on the turf, and fell into a great meditation.

Rose Salterne was a thorough specimen of a West-coast maiden, full of passionate impulsive affections, and wild dreamy imaginations, a fit subject, as the North-Devon women are still, for all romantic and gentle superstitions.  Left early without mother’s care, she had fed her fancy upon the legends and ballads of her native land, till she believed—­what did she not believe?—­of mermaids and pixies, charms and witches, dreams and omens, and all that world of magic in which most of the countrywomen, and countrymen too, believed firmly enough but twenty years ago.  Then her father’s house was seldom without some merchant, or sea-captain from foreign parts, who, like Othello, had his tales of—­

        “Antres vast, and deserts idle,
     Of rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads reach heaven.”

And,—­

     “And of the cannibals that each other eat,
     The anthropophagi, and men whose heads
     Do grow beneath their shoulders.”

All which tales, she, like Desdemona, devoured with greedy ears, whenever she could “the house affairs with haste despatch.”  And when these failed, there was still boundless store of wonders open to her in old romances which were then to be found in every English house of the better class.  The Legend of King Arthur, Florice and Blancheflour, Sir Ysumbras, Sir Guy of Warwick, Palamon and Arcite, and the Romaunt of the Rose, were with her text-books and canonical authorities.  And lucky it was, perhaps, for her that Sidney’s Arcadia was still in petto, or Mr. Frank (who had already seen the first book or two in manuscript, and extolled it above all books past, present, or to come) would have surely brought a copy down for Rose, and thereby have turned her poor little flighty brains upside down forever.  And with her head full of these, it was no wonder if she had likened herself of late more than once to some of those peerless princesses of old, for whose fair hand paladins and kaisers thundered against each other in tilted field; and perhaps she would not have been sorry (provided, of course, no one was killed) if duels, and passages of arms in honor of her, as her father reasonably dreaded, had actually taken place.