For several minutes they went on in silence, she in wonder waiting to hear what he would say, he melancholy and wrapped in meditation. At last they came to the edge of a wide wheat-field, over which the surface of the sunlit grain swayed and rippled like a lake of pale and molten gold. As the poet looked across it he smiled sadly, yet with a certain light recklessness of manner that belied the former seriousness of his look. “See,” he said, “the wheat inclines eastward; the wind is from the west. I’d have thee remember, Mistress Dare, that if in the near future I am no more to be seen, there is no deeper reason in’t than in this course the wind doth follow. To America I came, for the wind blew hither from the east. The wind is changed, madam, and so my way. ’Tis Fate ordains this brief farewell.” At these words Eleanor started perceptibly, her eyes opening wide in amazement. “Farewell!” she exclaimed. “O sir, what mean you by ‘farewell’?” He took her hand and, bending low, kissed it reverently. “I cannot say, for, alas! many know the present meaning, but none the hidden prophecy, of that word ‘farewell.’” “Yet surely, Master Marlowe, you contemplate no—” “Nay,” he rejoined, with a vague smile; “I shackle the Fates with their own thread for but a single day, and not forever.” Turning, he walked away on the margin of the wheat-field that now, no longer golden, swayed and whispered beneath an umbrous pall; and Eleanor, seeming to be bound by the spell of his mysticism, could only watch in silence his graceful, receding figure while the tall wheat-blades bent forward and touched him as he passed. When at last he was about to disappear, she would have started after him, but at this instant Virginia, flitting as though from nowhere to her mother’s side, called out to him, “Come back!” He turned. “Please, Master Kyt, come back and tell me the secret.” But Marlowe only shook his head, and, waving his hand, went forward with light footsteps into the woods. CHAPTER XXI “It lies not in our power to love or hate, For will in us is overrul’d by fate.” —MARLOWE, in _Hero and Leander_. As the poet made his way through the forest he came suddenly on a scene that caused him to pause, laugh, quicken his pace, and turn aside to another trail, by which he reached the shore. Here, shrugging his shoulders, he sat down on the sand, looking back now and then as if waiting to be joined by some one who occupied his thoughts. Whether or not this person would come he could not be sure, since the scene just witnessed had disclosed a new phase of the situation in which he had placed himself.