"When I go home--" said Sir Mortimer, and paused. The early light was on his face, a deeper light within his eyes that saw the rose which he should gather when he went home. Then, since he would not utter so deep and dear a thought--"When we go home," he said, and began to speak--half in earnest, half in relief from the gravity of the past council--of that returning. By degrees the fire burned, and he whose spirit the live coal touched as it touched Sidney's and, more rarely, Walter Raleigh's, bore his listeners with him in a rhapsody of anticipation. Long fronds of palm drooped without the room which held them, Englishmen in a world or savage or Spanish, but their spirits followed the speaker to green fields of Kent or Devon. They saw the English summer, saw the twilight fall, heard the lonely tinkle of far sheep-bells, heard the nightingales singing beneath the moon that shone on England. Friends' homes opened to them; Grenville welcomed them to Stowe, Sidney to charmed Penshurst. Then to London and the Triple Tun! Bow Bells rang for them; they drank in the inn's long-room; their names were in men's mouths. What welcome, what clashing of the bells, when they should sail up the Thames again--the _Mere Honour_, the _Cygnet_, the _Marigold_, and the _Phoenix_--with treasure in their holds, and for pilot that bright angel Fame! What should they buy with their treasure? what should they do with their fame? Treasure should beget stout ships, stout hearts to sail them; fame, laid to increase, might swell to deathless glory! Sea-captains now, sea-kings would the English be, gathering tribute from the waters and the winds, bringing gifts to England--frankincense of wealth, myrrh of knowledge, spikenard of power!--till, robed and crowned, she rose above the peoples, Joseph's sheaf, Joseph's star! On went the charmed words, each a lantern flashed on thought, grave, poetic, telling of triumph, yet far removed from gross optimism, not without that strange, melancholy note sounding now and again amongst the age's crashing chords. Abruptly his voice fell, but presently with a lighter note he broke the silence in which his listeners gazed upon the stately vision he had conjured up. "Ah, we will talk to Frank Drake of this night! Canst not hear Richard Hawkins laugh in the Triple Tun's long-room? The Queen, too, in her palace will laugh,--like a man with the flash in her eye and her white hand clenched! And they whom we love.... What is the word for to-night, John Nevil? I may give it? Then--Dione!"