He was in love with a sweet English girl, Gertrude Wylde, who lived in Surrey; and she, for her part, was the daughter of a small tenant-farmer there, well connected as to family, but not well furnished with worldly goods, Guy's father was a country gentleman; but that circumstance failed to affect the young man's eyesight and emotions injuriously; he beheld Gertrude, and he loved her. I can see it all, now, as if it were something that had happened to myself--how they strolled together in those wondrous lanes hedged with hawthorn and brier and hazel, which stray so sweetly over the rolling lands about Dorking; how they met beneath the old yew tree where, half way up Box Hill, it hung out its foliage black as night, spotted with strange waxen blossoms of scarlet, like drops of blood upon a funeral-pall; how they wandered in the untamed forest of great box trees at the top; what joys they had, what anxieties beset them. "And will thy father indeed take his leave of old England so soon?" he asked her, when they had reached the brow of the hill. "Yes, in truth," she answered, sadly enough, looking out over the white chalk highlands, and the arborous glades and open downs, to where the waters of the English Channel showed soft against the hazy sky at the horizon, like a blue vein on a circling arm. "And that means that I must take leave of _thee_, Guy." "Never, my darling!" cried Guy, drawing her to him. "If thou goest, I go as well." "What! Forsake all here--estate and fortune and family? Nay, dearest, that can never be." But, as she spoke these words, Gertrude pressed her face upon his shoulder and gave way to tears. Then presently, raising her head and gazing up into his face: "How should it be possible?" she asked. "Easily enough, if thou wilt," he replied. "I would go as thy affianced husband." Thus it was settled that he also should join the colonizing expedition with which Gertrude's father had resolved to embark, under the patronage of Sir Walter Raleigh. Its goal was Roanoke Island, Virginia. As the lovers walked homeward in company, and parted to go their separate ways, they felt as if their feet already trod the shores of the New World. "But when we are there," said Wharton before he left her at the turnstile that ushered the way to her father's farm--"there we shall have no more partings." Alas, he was but a poor prophet! Difficulties came up. Wharton's father violently opposed the plan that Guy had made. That, however, might not have prevented its execution, had not a fatal thing happened just at the critical time. On the eve of the sailing of the expedition, Guy's father died. That which his bitterest activity while alive failed to effect was accomplished by his white and silent presence as he lay dead in the old manor-house. At such a moment Guy could not go away; the unspoken edict of death restrained him absolutely. Besides, the elder Wharton's affairs were left in a confusion which it would take long to clear up.