He was quite ready to fulfil his promise. The next Saturday afternoon, the holiday of London ’prentices, was the time fixed upon. Will asked his cousin’s leave to bring with them his fellow-apprentice, and Walter somewhat reluctantly consented. He found Eustace Jenkyns, however, a notable addition to their party. He was a bold, merry scapegrace, who, to Walter’s surprise, seemed quite an authority upon nautical matters; but, as Will privately informed him, was “nowhere” in the business, and just now in disgrace with his master for sundry acts of gross inattention and carelessness. Naturally idle and restless, he had fallen in with some of the wild speculations current at the time, and these had filled his head with visions of money-getting, far more rapid than any the workshop or the counter could realize. He talked of the gold to be won in the far West by brave hearts and ready hands, even alluding to the legend, already well known to Walter, of the lake of Parima and the golden city of Manoa or El Dorado. Walter believed, for his part, that the Incas who had been dispossessed by the Spaniards were still reigning there in barbaric splendour; and many and many a time, as he sat in the window of the old hall in his childhood’s home with some early narrative of travel borrowed from the vicar before him, had he dreamed of finding and restoring them. Eustace Jenkyns did not care in the least for the lost Incas, but he cared for gold and for glory. Of these he talked, while Walter listened—and the poison shot through his veins like fire. Gold would be welcome, of course, to one who knew so well the pains and privations of poverty. But glory!—that was the bait that drew him irresistibly on. He was not greatly shocked when at last Eustace trusted him with his grand secret. “I was not made for crying, ‘What do you lack, my masters?’ or for twisting steel wires and copper filings either,” he said. “My Christmas box is broken and spent long ago, my credit gone, my master turned against me. ’Twere no great matter to break my indentures too, and slip off in the dark next Friday se’nnight to the _English Merchantman_. So Master Nevit would lose a bad ’prentice, and the service would gain a good sailor. And what would you think, Master Walter, of flinging off that pretty scholar’s gown, crying, ‘Ho, for the high seas!’ and joining me!” “Fie on you, Jenkyns!” cried Walter, turning away half angry, half amused. And yet the shaft hit. A chain of circumstances, slight, yet strong, had woven itself around him, and by this he was being gradually drawn onwards to a deed from which, if boldly proposed to him at first, he would have turned away in horror. And yet, if his heart had not yielded already to temptation, these circumstances would have been as powerless to draw him as threads of gossamer.