Many of the colonists, despite their new-found comfort and prosperity, were yet unsatisfied. Their hearts yearned for England. Gradually they went from bad to worse. Their turbulence, vice, and incontinence ran riot as never before. Only a few labored steadily for the common good. On these the others lived as parasites. Yet the minority averted the colony’s dissolution. Eleanor Dare, for one, by a daily example of fortitude, a never-failing sympathy, a detailed attention to the little ills and troubles of her fellows, served, through her influence upon the women, to maintain the industry of the men. While, however, it was she who thus gradually turned sorrowful resignation to contentment, it was Vytal who, by personal and continual contact with the planters, dominated their wills and held them fast to duty. The control of these two superior spirits, one feminine, the other masculine, and each the other’s need, formed an almost perfect diarchy, by which the colonists of Virginia were governed for many years. The influence of a third dominant spirit is more difficult to define, being that of Christopher Marlowe, whose temperament, ever varying and mystical, was understood by few. As months passed the poet became again enveloped in abstraction, until at last his mind seemed to be concentrated on some definite purpose, of which the existence was made evident by an unusual taciturnity and set expression, while the purpose itself remained a mystery. It had become the custom of Marlowe to absent himself daily from the town, and to pursue his solitary way, morning after morning, to a northeastern promontory that stretched out into the sea from an adjacent island. On these walks he was always, by apparent intention, alone. Standing on the shore, with face turned northward and eyes intent on scanning the wide horizon, his graceful figure was ever solitary, his reflections ever with no response save from his inward self. Thus for months, without the exception of a single day, he went to the promontory, until his patience was rewarded by the sight of that which he had so long awaited. An instinct, a premonition, an inward certainty, call it what he would, had told him that his determination must find an opportunity at last. Therefore, when the chance to work his will finally offered itself, he regarded it with small surprise. He called himself, not without a certain vain though mournful loftiness, the agent of Destiny; hence, when Destiny came to claim self-sacrifice at his hands, he met it with familiar greeting. Starting out to welcome that which he termed “Incarnate Fate,” he made his way farther north, and having finally, as he told himself, “bound the Parcæ with their own thread,” returned to Croatan.