Suddenly he paused and leaned forward. A long rope shone lustrous amid the tendrils of the arbor. “Body o’ me! ’tis the very strand!” and, extricating it, he looked about to make sure that even the bear had not discovered his secret. Then, as King Lud disappeared in the woods, he sat down for a moment on the ground, and, gently laying the shining curls across his knees, stroked them again and again, murmuring inaudibly as they moved restlessly in the breeze or caught in his clumsy fingers, while, with a bewildered expression, he rolled his eyes. At last he thrust the golden braid into the bosom of his doublet, and for once the new mournfulness of his round, red face was not absurd. But presently he frowned and rose jerkily to his feet. “Yes, that pygmy Rouse is right,” he muttered. “Ye’re daft, Roger Prat—daft, indeed.” Thereafter, calling to the bear, he spent the day in returning laboriously to Croatan, on whose shore the animal, sufficiently tamed to rove at large, left him, and, still with an unsatisfied appetite, loped off into the forest. * * * * * In the evening Eleanor Dare sat in her dining-room with Vytal. “Then he has actually gone?” “Yes, on a Breton shallop. He waited for months, hoping that the chance would come at last.” “But he never told me,” said Eleanor. “Nay, for perhaps the power was not in him.” She looked deeply thoughtful. “Oh, I comprehend it all now, but then I considered the farewell one of his vagaries. I thought he was bidding good-bye to me only—you understand—yet now his words come back to me with double force. Captain Vytal, we have lost a friend.” “Yes,” said the soldier, “in truth a friend. It is my duty, however, to tell you that we have regained an enemy;” with which he told her briefly of their meeting with Frazer, of the latter’s pretensions, trickery, and escape. At mention of the duel’s climax, he coldly chid himself without forbearance as he would have censured any other in his place. “There will be a second attempted invasion,” he said, “to repel which we must harbor all our strength. In some unaccountable way this fellow hath escaped Manteo, who but just now has returned, after a futile search. Moreover, Mistress Dare—” But he paused abruptly. He would say no more. From her and from all he must withhold for always the conviction that, by some terrible mischance, John White had come to Roanoke again and gone. For a moment her eyes questioned him, but, finding no answer, she forbore to voice the query, and quickly dismissed the subject as he willed. Her eyes flashed. “We must, at all cost, defeat them, and assert our rights so strongly as to preclude the possibility of repeated threats.” “We shall.” “Oh, captain, I pray you give me work to do in our defence. Idleness palls upon me in times like these. Give me opportunity, if needs be, to suffer for the common good.”