They lived for each other.  They neither visited nor received visits.  Yet they were often, and by degrees oftener, apart; my Master locked up with his books, my Mistress roaming the walls with her hound or seated by her lattice high on the seaward side of the castle.  Sometimes (but this was usually on moonlit nights or windless evenings when the sun sank clear to view over our broad bay) she would take up her lute and touch it to one of those outlandish love-chants with which she had first wiled my Master’s heart to her.  As time went on, stories came to us that these chants, which fell so softly on the ears of us as we went about the rooms and gardens, had been heard by fishermen riding by their nets far in the offing—­so far away (I have heard) as the Scillies; and there were tales of men who, as they listened, had seen the ghosts of drowned mariners rising and falling on the moon-rays, or floating with their white faces thrown back while they drank in the music; yea, even echoing the words of the song in whispers like the flutter of birds’ wings.

When first the word crept about that she was a witch I cannot certainly say.  But in time it did; and, what is more—­though I will swear that no word of Gil Perez’ confession ever passed my lips—­the common folk soon held it for a certainty that the cargo saved from the Saint Andrew had been saved by her magic only; that the plate and rich stuffs seen by my own eyes were but cheating simulacra, and had turned into rubbish at midnight, scarce an hour before the assault on the Portuguese.

I have wondered since if ’twas this rumour and some belief in it which held Messrs. Saint Aubyn and Godolphin from offering any further attack on us.  You might say that it was open to them, so believing, to have denounced her publicly.  But in our country Holy Church had little hold—­scarce more than the King’s law itself in such matters; and within my memory it has always come easier to us to fear witch-craft than to denounce it.  Also (and it concerns my tale) the three years which followed the stranding of the Saint Andrew were remarkable for a great number of wrecks upon our coast.  In that short time we of our parish and the men of St. Hilary upon our north were between us favoured with no fewer than fourteen; the most of them vessels of good burden.  Of any hand in bringing them ashore I know our gentry to have been innocent.  Still, there were pickings; and finding that my Master held aloof from all share in such and (as far as could be) held his servants aloof, our neighbours, though not accepting this for quittance, forbore to press the affair of the Saint Andrew further than by spreading injurious tales and whispers.

The marvel was that we of Pengersick (who reaped nothing of this harvest) fell none the less under suspicion of decoying the vessels ashore.  More than once in my dealings with the fishermen and tradesmen of Market Jew, I happened on hints of this; but nothing which could be taken hold of until one day a certain Peter Chynoweth of that town, coming drunk to Pengersick with a basket of fish, blurted out the tale.  Said he, after I had beaten him down to a reasonable price, “Twould be easy enough, one would think, to spare an honest man a groat of the fortune Pengersick makes on these dark nights.”