“Ah,” said Sir Walter, as we stood waiting for the mob to get off the ship, “the monk would have told us so if those dogs had not murdered him. Doubtless he remained behind when the others fled away, to nurse the living and bury the dead, and solaced himself, poor soul, by setting candles to his saints.” Ere we were put into Plymouth town again there were eighty of our hundred dead of the smallpox; and I was carried ashore more dead than alive, to be nursed back to health by the Lady Raleigh’s ministering hands. CHAPTER VII.—OUR LAST YEARS TOGETHER. I came out of that illness no longer the youth I had been; for God used the things that had happened me to make a change in my heart. I went very near to death, and I came back to life very grievously disfigured, yea, as though I had been slashed criss-cross with swords, and the sight of one of mine eyes gone. Nevermore should I ruffle it with gallants; and indeed it seemed a bitter and cruel thing to the boy, this ruin of comeliness, so that for long the bitterness was greater than death, yet since then the man has learned to thank the Hand that wielded that most merciful rod. I was yet but a moping thing, creeping up heavily from death to life, when my lord sailed on that expedition to Cadiz with the Lord Admiral Thomas Howard and his old-time enemy the Lord Essex, which brought such glory to the English name. I think there was but one part of my old self remained alive in me, and that was my love for Sir Walter, which is wrought so inextricably within the chords of my being that nothing shall disentangle it. I had been sick to death during that time when Sir Walter had wrestled vainly with the Queen for an expedition to Guiana, and been discomfited. For truly her will was brass and iron; nothing for man, however great, to prevail against, and for long her face had been turned away from him, and seemed like to remain so. I was getting well, with no heart to recover, when the reports came of the Cadiz expedition. It was glorious summer weather, and my Lady Raleigh, whose patience was more than human with me, would have me carried to the lawn under shade of trees; and there laid on my pillows I would listen to her proud recitals of her lord’s heroic deeds.