“He is none; and I have cause enough to know it!” And, for want of a better confidant, Rose poured into the willing ears of her companion the whole story of yesterday’s meeting.

“He’s a pretty wooer!” said Lucy at last, contemptuously.  “Be a brave maid, then, be a brave maid, and never terrify yourself with his unlucky face.  It’s because there was none here worthy of ye, that ye seed none in glass.  Maybe he’s to be a foreigner, from over seas, and that’s why his sperit was so long a coming.  A duke, or a prince to the least, I’ll warrant, he’ll be, that carries off the Rose of Bideford.”

But in spite of all the good dame’s flattery, Rose could not wipe that fierce face away from her eyeballs.  She reached home safely, and crept to bed undiscovered:  and when the next morning, as was to be expected, found her laid up with something very like a fever, from excitement, terror, and cold, the phantom grew stronger and stronger before her, and it required all her woman’s tact and self-restraint to avoid betraying by her exclamations what had happened on that fantastic night.  After a fortnight’s weakness, however, she recovered and went back to Bideford:  but ere she arrived there, Amyas was far across the seas on his way to Milford Haven, as shall be told in the ensuing chapters.

CHAPTER VII

THE TRUE AND TRAGICAL HISTORY OF MR. JOHN OXENHAM OF PLYMOUTH

“The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew;
The furrow follow’d free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.”

The Ancient Mariner.

It was too late and too dark last night to see the old house at Stow.  We will look round us, then, this bright October day, while Sir Richard and Amyas, about eleven o’clock in the forenoon, are pacing up and down the terraced garden to the south.  Amyas has slept till luncheon, i. e. till an hour ago:  but Sir Richard, in spite of the bustle of last night, was up and in the valley by six o’clock, recreating the valiant souls of himself and two terrier dogs by the chase of sundry badgers.

Old Stow House stands, or rather stood, some four miles beyond the Cornish border, on the northern slope of the largest and loveliest of those combes of which I spoke in the last chapter.  Eighty years after Sir Richard’s time there arose there a huge Palladian pile, bedizened with every monstrosity of bad taste, which was built, so the story runs, by Charles the Second, for Sir Richard’s great-grandson, the heir of that famous Sir Bevil who defeated the Parliamentary troops at Stratton, and died soon after, fighting valiantly at Lansdowne over Bath.  But, like most other things which owed their existence to the Stuarts, it rose only to fall again.  An old man who had seen, as a boy, the foundation of the new house laid, lived to see it pulled down again, and the very bricks and timber sold upon the spot; and since then the stables have become a farm-house, the tennis-court a sheep-cote, the great quadrangle a rick-yard; and civilization, spreading wave on wave so fast elsewhere, has surged back from that lonely corner of the land—­let us hope, only for a while.