He brushed back a strand of hair from her forehead, stifling a deep moan. For once his very soul seemed falling to an abyss of fear. Fatalism was overcome by yearning, the power of endurance by the acute agony of doubt. Uncertainty laid an icy chill upon his spirit—the spirit of a child lost in the universe. Essential grief stood face to face with essential joy, each expecting, yet despairing of the victory. And the result of this meeting seemed to ravage the elements of being. Once more Eleanor gazed up to his anguished face. “Strength returns,” she said, with a wan smile. He trembled and turned toward the forest, consumed by impatience of the soul. “Manteo hath gone for healing herbs,” he said. “O God, spare her to me!” Long he stood with head bowed and eyes gazing into her face; long he stood, a bleak rock of the shore, stern, rigid, fixed, striving to force upon himself the utter calm of self-surrender and finality. But at the last she stretched out her arms and drew him closer to her. “God is good,” she said. “In my heart he tells me I shall live.” Yet even now, as the spirit of promise seemed to be breathed into their souls, Eleanor, reading Vytal’s face, realized that beneath all his silent hope that word “failure” had not been obliterated from his great masculine heart. For the colony of Roanoke was no more. “Dost not see,” she asked, brokenly, “that success is ours?… Of a surety, never again will Spaniards seek to land on this Virginia shore.” Her words were scarcely audible. “Their leader is dead, their lesson learned.… Future generations will find here a perfect security … because we, the first, have suffered … and yet won.” She raised herself to one elbow, bravely subduing her faintness, and pointed toward the headland. “Look.” The two mists—the mist of ashes and of the ocean—were gray no longer. The first flush of morning suffused itself over sea and land. Eleanor’s eyes sought Vytal’s, but now from the light he turned and looked steadfastly at the broad, deep forest of the west, with prophetic resignation in his gaze, as at a world not wholly lost, yet only by others to be won. Her hand touched his gently. “I am not alone,” he said; “nay, not alone.” THE END FOOTNOTES [1] Incredible as it may seem, this despicable deed of cruelty has been authentically recorded by writers of the time. [2] As there is absolutely no reliable record of Marlowe’s personal life and dwelling-place at this time, I have felt justified in attributing his generally acknowledged absence from London to a Virginia voyage. [3] See Hakluyt’s Voyages. [4] It was a common belief of the time that a river ran all the way from Virginia to Florida. [5] Backgammon. [6] This prelude was written in scorn of his predecessors, and to herald his own conception of a loftier English drama. [7] From the personal account of Governor White, in _Hakluyt’s Voyages_.