heads, and cursed them all for drunken fools, and as he spoke he lashed with his whip from side to side, and his face gleamed with wrath like a demon’s in the full light, and I saw he was Captain Noel Jaynes, and well understood how he had made a name for himself on the high seas.  After him rode the brothers, Nicholas and Richard Barry, two great men, sticking to their saddles like rocks, with fair locks alike on the head of each flung out on the wind, and then came Ralph Drake rising in his stirrups and laughing wildly, and last Parson Downs, but only last because the road was blocked, for verily I thought his plunging horse would have all before him under his feet.  They were all past me in a trice like a dream, the May revellers scattering and hastening forward with shrieks of terror and shouts of rage and peals of defiant laughter, and Captain Jaynes’ voice, like a trumpet, overbearing everything, and shouts from the Barry brothers echoing him, and now and then coming the deep rumble of expostulations from the parson’s great chest, and Ralph Drake’s peals of horse-laughter, and I was left to consider what a tinder-box this Colony of Virginia was, and how ready to leap to flame at a spark even when seemingly most at peace, and to regard with more and more anxiety Mary Cavendish’s part in this brewing tumult.

After the shouting and hallooing throng had passed I walked along slowly, reflecting, as I have said, when I saw in the road before me two advancing—­a woman, and a man leading a horse by the bridle, and it was Mary Cavendish and Sir Humphrey Hyde.

And when I came up with them they stopped, and Humphrey addressed me rudely enough, but as one gentleman might another when he was angered with him, and not contemptuously, for that was never the lad’s way with me.  “Master Wingfield,” he said, standing before me and holding his champing horse hard by the bits, “I pray you have the grace to explain this matter of the goods.”

I saw that Mistress Mary had been acquainting him with what had passed and her puzzlement over it.

“There is naught to explain, Sir Humphrey,” said I. “’Tis very simple:  Mistress Mary hath the goods for which she sent to England.”

“Master Wingfield, you know those are my Lady Culpeper’s goods, and I have no right to them,” cried Mary.  But I bowed and said, “Madam, the goods are yours, and not Lady Culpeper’s.”

“But I—­I lied when I gave the list to my grandmother,” she cried out, half sobbing, for she was, after all, little more than a child tiptoed to womanhood by enthusiasm.

“Madam,” said I, and I bowed again.  “You mistake yourself; Mistress Mary Cavendish cannot lie, and the goods are in truth yours.”

She and Sir Humphrey looked at each other; then Harry made a stride forward, and forcing back his horse with one hand, grasped me with the other.  “Harry, Harry,” he said in a whisper.  “Tell me, for God’s sake, what have you done.”