sky! What! am I fallen so low that my very page flouts me, kicks
obedience out-of-doors?"

Robin-a-dale straightened himself and began to sing, with bravado, a
fierce red in his cheeks, and his young voice high and clear:

"Now list to me, ladies, and list to me, gentles;
I've a story for your ears of a false, false knight,
Whom England held in honor, but he treasured Spain so dearly
That he sold into her hands his comrades in fight.

"'Twas before a walled city with the palm-trees hanging over;
He was Captain of the _Cygnet_, and it sank before his eyes;
The Englishmen ashore, they're taken in the pitfall,
Good lack! they toil in galleys or their souls to God arise.

"He sees them in his sleep, the craven and the traitor.
The sea it keeps their bones, their bloody ghosts they pass--"

"For God's sake!" cried Arden; and the boy, snatching with despairing
haste at the interruption, ceased his singing, and in the heavy silence
that followed crept nearer and nearer to his master until he touched a
listless hand.

"Ay, Robin," said Ferne, absently, and laid the hand upon his head. "And
the bloody ghosts they pass."

Arden spoke with emotion: "All men when their final account is made up
may have sights to see that now they dream not of. Thou art both too
much and too little what thou wast of old, and thou seest not fairly in
these shadows. I know that Philip Sidney and John Nevil have come to
Ferne House, and here am I, thy oldest comrade of them all. A sheet of
paper close written with record of noble deeds becomes not worthless
because of one deep blot."

Ferne, his burst of passion past, arose and moved from table to window,
from window to great chimney-piece. There was that in the quiet, almost
stealthy regularity of his motions that gave subtle suggestion of days
and nights spent in pacing to and fro, to and fro, this
deep-windowed room.

At last he spoke, pausing by the fireless hearth: "I say not that it is
so, nor that there is not One who may read the writing beneath the blot.
But from the time of Cain to the present hour if the blotted sheet be
bound with the spotless the book is little esteemed."

"Cain slew his brother wilfully," said Arden.

"That also is told us," answered the other. "Jealousy constrained him,
while constancy of soul was lacking unto me. I know not if it was but
taken from me for a time, or if, despite all seeming, I never did
pos