f secrecy, not knowing when he strikes
his first blow whether his own brother's hand will be with him
against the common tyrant, or against himself.

Were it not for this lamentable quality of the human heart, which
will prevent forever the perfect concerting of power to one end,
such a giant might be made of one people that it could hold all the
world and all the nations thereof at its beck and call. But that
cannot be, even in England, which had known and knows now and will
know again that division of interest and doubts, every man of his
brother's heart, which weaken the arm against the common foe.

But, reflecting in such wise, I came no nearer to the answer to my
quandary as to my best course for the protection of Mary Cavendish.

I sat there on that rock glittering like frost-work in the May
sunlight and watched the river current until it seemed to me that my
rock and all Virginia were going out on the tide to sea and back to
England, where, had I landed then, I would have lost my head and all
my wondering with it, and my old astonishment, which I had had from
a boy, was upon me, that so many things that be, according to the
apparent evidence of our senses are not, and how can any man ever be
sure that he is on sea or land, or coming or going? And comes there
not to all of us some day a great shock of knowledge of the slipping
past of this world, and all the history thereof which we think of so
much moment, and that we only are that which remains? But then
verily it seemed to me that the matter of the tobacco plot and Mary
Cavendish's danger was of more moment than aught else in the
century.

"Master Wingfield," said a voice so gently and sweetly repellent and
forbidding, even while it entreated, that it shivered the air with
discord, and I looked around, and there stood Catherine Cavendish.
She stood quite near the rock where I sat, but she kept her head
turned slightly away as if she could not bear the sight of my face,
though she was constrained to speak to me. But I, and I speak the
truth, since I held it unworthy a man and a gentleman to feel aught
of wrath or contempt when he was sole sufferer by reason of any
wrong done by a woman, had nothing but that ever recurrent surprise
and unbelief at the sight of her, to reconcile what I knew, or
thought I knew, with what she seemed.

I rose and stepped from my rock to the green shore, and she moved a
little back with a slight courtesy. "Good-morning, Mistress