At noon the colonists assembled near the fortress, while John Vytal spoke to them. By the captain’s side stood Manteo, utterly impassive, and, next to the Indian, Christopher Marlowe, seemingly wrapped in a high abstraction. In the foremost line of the small half-circle Hugh Rouse and Roger Prat were intently listening; while from a knoll, apart from the group, yet well within earshot, Eleanor Dare watched the speaker. About the foot of the mound a little girl, apparently about three years old, played with drooping wild-flowers. Like a butterfly just from the cocoon, she flittered hither and thither, with uncertain, hesitating motion, yet a grace so light and aerial that seemingly a thread of sunlight could have bound her, since no breeze was there to carry her away. Though actual gossamer wings were unaccountably lacking, a gossamer spirit was hers, ethereal, as if born of a maiden’s dream. Yet, as the wing of a butterfly winces if the flower it touches droops, there was that in her which told vaguely of sorrow, as though in the past, long before her earthly life, her devotion for some one had been repelled. And now even these strange wild ferns and unnamed blossoms of the field about her hung their heads and turned away. Yet she was of them. Was the sadness an inborn, unconscious memory, a dim result arising from the fact that her father had been spurned, and that of the contempt and repugnance in which her mother had held him, long months before Virginia’s birth, she was the offspring? These were the thoughts and questions in the mind of Marlowe as he turned to watch the child at play. Her mystic sadness was not the effect of an infancy amid hardship and affliction. He believed she would never be touched by tangible sorrows. He pictured her as grown to womanhood, yet never amenable to ordinary grief. No; it was only that the maiden’s dream from which this child seemed sprung had ended with an awakening from vague and roseate fancies to a cold, remorseless fact. The _soul_ of the child had no father; she was not conceived of love. The world holds many like her, beautiful and sound in body, and in spirit beautiful but incomplete. As the poet watched her playing about her mother’s feet, with all the babble and waywardness of blithesome elfinry, his thoughts grew more abstracted. He no longer saw the sunny head, the peony lips, and the little oval face, mirthful but very pale; he no longer compared the features to Eleanor’s, noting the surface likeness, the difference underneath; he no longer drew a distinction between the spiritual deeps of the mother’s eyes and the mystical prescience of the daughter’s, which lay also beneath a veil of hazel light.