“In his captivity he had made friends with a fellow prisoner, an Englishman named Prince or Prance (since dead, after no less than thirty years of servitude), who had fallen among the Moors in the manner following.  In his youth he had been a seaman, and one day in the year 1370 he was standing idle on Bristol Quay when a young squire accosted him and offered to hire him for a voyage to France, naming a good wage and pressing no small share of it upon him as earnest money.  The ship (he said, naming her) lay below at Avonmouth and would sail that same night.  Prince knew the ship and her master, and judged from the young squire’s apparel and bearing that here was one of those voluntary expeditions by which our young nobles made it a fashion to seek fame at the expense of our enemies the French; a venture dangerous indeed but carrying a hopeful chance of high profits.  He agreed, therefore, and joined the ship a little after nightfall.  Toward midnight arrived a boat with our young squire and one companion, a lady of extreme beauty, who had no sooner climbed the ship’s side than the master cut the anchor-cable and stood out for sea.

“The names of these pretty runaways were Robert Machin and Anne d’Arfet, wife of a sour merchant of Bristol; and all their care was to flee together and lose all the world for love.  But they never reached France; for having run prosperously down Channel and across from the Land’s End until they sighted Ushant, they met a north-easterly gale which blew them off the coast; a gale so blind and terrible and persistent that for twelve days they ran before it, in peril of death.  On the thirteenth day they sighted an island, where, having found (as they thought) good anchorage, they brought the ship to, and rowed the lady ashore through the surf.  Between suffering and terror she was already close upon death.

“Now this man Prince said that ’though the seamen laid their peril at her door, holding the monstrous storm to be a judgment direct from Heaven upon her sin, yet not one of them, considering her childish beauty, had the heart to throw her an ill word or so much as an accusing look:  but having borne her ashore they built a tabernacle of boughs and roofed it with a spare sail for her and for her lover, who watched beside her till she died.

“On the morning of her death the seamen, who slept on the beach at a little distance, were awakened by a terrible cry:  whereat, gazing seaward—­as a seaman’s first impulse is—­they missed all sight of their ship.  Either the gale, reviving, had parted her moorings and blown her out to sea, or else the two or three left on board her treacherously slipped her cable.  At all events, no more was ever heard of her.

“The seamen supposed then that Master Machin had called out for the loss of the ship.  But coming to him they found him staring at the poor corpse of his lady; and when they pointed to sea he appeared to mark not their meaning.  Only he said many times, ’Is she gone?  Is she gone?’ Whether he spoke of the ship or of the lady they could not tell.  Thereafter he said nothing, but turned his face away from all offers of food, and on the fifth day the seaman buried him beside his mistress and set up a wooden cross at their heads.