gardner,
Ralph?"

"It's Diccon's doing. He is anxious to please his mistress."

"Who neither sews, nor cooks, nor plants! What does she do?"

"She pulls the roses," I said. "Come in."

When we had entered the house he stared about him; then cried out,
"Acrasia's bower! Oh, thou sometime Guyon!" and began to laugh.

It was late afternoon, and the slant sunshine streaming in at door and
window striped wall and floor with gold. Floor and wall were no longer
logs gnarled and stained: upon the one lay a carpet of delicate ferns
and aromatic leaves, and glossy vines, purple-berried, tapestried
the other. Flowers--purple and red and yellow--were everywhere. As we
entered, a figure started up from the hearth.

"St. George!" exclaimed Rolfe. "You have never married a blackamoor?"

"It is the negress, Angela," I said. "I bought her from William Pierce
the other day. Mistress Percy wished a waiting damsel."

The creature, one of the five females of her kind then in Virginia,
looked at us with large, rolling eyes. She knew a little Spanish, and I
spoke to her in that tongue, bidding her find her mistress and tell her
that company waited. When she was gone I placed a jack of ale upon the
table, and Rolfe and I sat down to discuss it. Had I been in a mood
for laughter, I could have found reason in his puzzled face. There were
flowers upon the table, and beside them a litter of small objects, one
of which he now took up.

"A white glove," he said, "perfumed and silver-fringed, and of a size to
fit Titania."

I spread its mate out upon my palm. "A woman's hand. Too white, too
soft, and too small."

He touched lightly, one by one, the slender fingers of the glove he
held. "A woman's hand,--strength in weakness, veiled power, the star in
the mist, guiding, beckoning, drawing upward!"

I laughed and threw the glove from me. "The star, a will-of-the-wisp;
the goal, a slough," I said.

As he sat opposite me a change came over his face, a change so great
that I knew before I turned that she was in the room.

The bundle which I had carried for her from Jamestown was neither small
nor light. Why, when she fled, she chose to burden herself with such
toys, or whether she gave a thought to the suspicions that might be
raised in Virginia if one of Sir Edwyn's maids bedecked herself in silk
and lace and jewels, I do not know, but she had brought to the forest
and the tobacco fields the gauds of a maid of honor. The Puritan dress
i