you compliments, but I perceive that this New World air can even paint the lily. If there are young bloods in Charles Town, their hearts will beat faster when you step on shore."
She seemed not to hear.
"We are going to find him," she murmured, as though she were communing with her own thoughts. "We are going to find Gilbert."
Fate had arranged the prelude whimsically. All who were to play leading parts in the drama saw the Queen Bess come in except Lachlan McDonald. James Almayne, the hunter, gossiping with Jock Pearson and certain other wilderness men in front of a waterfront tavern, watched the ship's slow progress up the bay. Mr. Francis O'Sullivan, tutor and fencing master, was fishing that forenoon near Granville's Bastion and, between infrequent nibbles, saw the Queen Bess glide superbly past to her anchorage amid the shipping in the stream. These two looked on with languid interest, not being able to read the future. But Edward Stanwicke of Stanwicke Hall, at that moment engaged in earnest conversation in the library of his town house beyond the Governor's Bridge, bestirred himself when a negro servant brought word that the Queen Bess was well within the harbour.
The man with whom he had been conversing—a tall, powerful, handsome man, high-coloured and dark-moustached, whose dress and gear were those of a soldier and yet smacked somehow of the sea—
