"It is the _George_," I said. The lady who sat beside me caught her breath. "Ay, sweetheart," I went on. "She carries one for whom she waited. He has gone from out our life for ever." She uttered a low cry and turned to me, trembling, her lips parted, her eyes eloquent. "We will not speak of him," I said. "As if he were dead, let his name rest between us. I have another thing to tell thee, dear heart, dear court lady masking as a waiting damsel, dear ward of the King whom his Majesty hath thundered against for so many weary months. Would it grieve thee to go home, after all?" "Home?" she asked. "To Weyanoke? That would not grieve me." "Not to Weyanoke, but to England," I said. "The _George_ is gone, but three days since the _Esperance_ came in. When she sails again I think that we must go." She gazed at me with a whitening face. "And you?" she whispered. "How will you go? In chains?" I took her clasped hands, parted them, and drew her arms around my neck. "Ay," I answered, "I will go in chains that I care not to have broken. My dear love, I think that the summer lies fair before us. Listen while I tell thee of news that the _Esperance_ brought." While I told of new orders from the Company to the Governor and of my letter from Buckingham, the minister rested upon his oars that he might hear the better. When I had ceased to speak he bent to them again, and his tireless strength sent us swiftly over the glassy water toward the town that was no longer distant. "I am more glad than I can tell you, Ralph and Jocelyn," he said; and the smile with which he spoke made his face beautiful. The light streaming to us from the ruddy west laid roses in the cheeks of the sometime ward of the King, and the low wind lifted the dark hair from her forehead. Her head was on my breast, her hand in mine; we cared not to speak, we were so happy. On her finger was her wedding ring, the ring that was only a link torn from the gold chain Prince Maurice had given me. When she saw my eyes upon it, she raised her hand and kissed the rude circlet. The hue of the sunset lingered in cloud and water, and in the pale heavens above the rose and purple shone the evening star. The cloudlike ship at which we had gazed was gone into the distance and the twilight; we saw her no more. Broad between its blackening shores stretched the James, mirroring the bloom in the west, the silver star, the lights upon the _Esperance_ that lay between us and the town. Aboard her the mariners were singing, and their song of the sea floated over the water to us, sweetly and like a love song. We passed the ship unhailed, and glided on to the haven where we would be. The singing behind us died away, but the song in our hearts kept on. All things die not: while the soul lives, love lives: the song may be now gay, now plaintive, but it is deathless. Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London. End of Project Gutenberg's By order of the company, by Mary Johnston