ulum swung
again, and the dreams came fast and faster. At times his brain turned
from its mad clash with gigantic, formless, elemental things to rest in
the beaten ways. They that listened heard the adventurer speak, heard
the courtier and the poet and the lover, but never once the traitor. Of
the fortress of Nueva Cordoba and of what had happened therein, of a
Spaniard, noble but in name, of an English knight and leader who had not
endured, who, where many a simple soul had stood fast to the end, had
redeemed his body with his honor, the man who raved of all things else
made no mention. Now with the sugared and fantastic protestation
demanded by court fashion and the deep, chivalric loyalty of his type he
spoke to the Queen of England, and now he was with Sidney at Penshurst,
Platonist, poet, Arcadian. Now he lived over old adventures, old
voyages, past battles, wrongs done and wrongs received, unremembered
loves and hatreds, and now he walked with Damaris Sedley in the garden
of his ancient house of Ferne.

Then at last he came to a land where he lay and watched always a small
round of azure wave and sky, lay idly with no need of thought or
memory, until after a lifetime of the sapphire round it occurred to him
to put forth a wasted hand, touch a sun-embrowned one, and whisper,
"Robin!" It was a day later, the ships nearing the Grand Canary, and
land birds flying past his circlet of sky and ocean, when, after lying
in silence for an hour with a faint frown upon his brow, he at last
remembered, and turned his face to the wall.

VIII

In a small withdrawing-room at Whitehall an agreeable young gentleman
pensioner, in love with his own voice, which was in truth mellifluous,
read aloud to a knot of the Queen's ladies. The room looked upon the
park, and the pale autumn sunshine flooding it made the most of rich
court raiment, purple hangings, green rushes on the floor, lengths of
crimson velvet designed for a notable piece of arras, and kindled into
flame the jewels upon white and flying fingers embroidering upon the
velvet the history of King David and the wife of Uriah.

"'It is not the color that commendeth a good painter,'" read the
gentleman pensioner, "'but the good countenance; nor the cutting that
valueth the diamond, but the virtue; nor the gloze of the tongue that
tryeth a friend, but the faith,'"

Mistress Damaris Sedley put the needle somewhat slowly through the
velvet, her fancy busy with other embro