John Gore and the two gentlemen had ridden over earlier that morning, for the sea-captain had business at Deptford that concerned the men who had lain with him in a Barbary prison. Nor were the three in my lord’s coach sympathetically arranged. There were three angles to the diagram, and though two of them may have been in geometrical agreement, the third spoiled the symmetry of the whole human proposition. For Barbara had never seemed more moody or distraught. She sat like a figure of Fate with her great eyes looking into the distance, and her face blank and impassive to any sallies from my lord. An atmosphere of dreariness and of apathy seemed to emanate from her, an atmosphere so sluggish and sincere that it blighted the two elders, who would have been buxom enough if they had been alone. The lord and the lady exchanged glances from time to time. They were wise in their generation, nor were they ready to be displeased at the little romance that appeared to be developing under their noses. The girl had an eccentric way of accepting homage. Yet they understood her to be a queer piece of morose comeliness; nor had she the habit of simpering like other women. Stephen Gore smiled, and looked with surreptitious shrewdness at the mother. “Pauvre petite!” “La maladie des femmes.—Jean et Jeanette!” They laughed and glanced, each of them; out of their respective windows, not noticing the dull gleam in the girl’s dark eyes. Meanwhile the Don John of their love prophecies had changed his nag for a fast wherry on the Thames, and had landed at Deptford stairs before my lord’s coach had come within sight of the towers of Westminster. Picking his way amid the sea-lumber of the place, he hunted out a tavern known as “The Eight Bells,” a tavern with great tipsy tables, and little windows like blinking eyes, and rough benches along the wall. Within, a parlor full of tobacco smoke, black beams, and copper-colored faces that seemed to conjure up all the adventuresomeness of the wild life of the sea. It was a corner of the world where men about a winter fire might tell tales of treasure, of sea-fights, and all the coarse, quaint, crudely colored romance of the Spanish seas. The mere words were magical to a roving spirit. Pieces of eight, culverins, great rivers with strange names, treasure-houses full of ingots of gold, the far islands of the buccaneers. There men should tell tales of wine drunk under tropical moons, of mulatto women in bright garments, of Indian girls, of prize-money and the smell of powder, and the salt sweat of the bustling seas. The whole strong perfume of that adventurous life seemed to permeate the shadows of that low-beamed room, with Jasper of the guns turning his hawk’s eyes from man to man, and talking of the days when the captain should sail the ship that they had already seen and coveted.