And verily Mary Cavendish did for a minute seem to blush as she cast a glance at herself in the mirror and saw her marvellous rose of a face, but the next minute the mirror flashed in the grass and her arms were about Cicely Hyde’s neck. “’Tis the dearest face in Virginia, Cicely,” said she, in her sweet, vehement way, and laid her pink cheek against the other’s plain one.  And Cicely laughed, and took her face in her two hands and held it away that she might see it.

“What matters it to poor Cicely whether her own face be fair or not, so long as it is dear to thee, and so long as she can see thine!” she cried as passionately as a lad might have done, and I frowned, not with jealousy, but with a curious dislike to such affection from one maid to another, which I could never understand in myself.  Had Cicely Hyde had a lover, she would have said that fond speech to him instead of Mary Cavendish, but lover she had none.

But all at once the two maids nudged one another, and turned their faces, all convulsed with merriment, and I looked and saw that the poor little black lass had crept on hands and knees to where the mirror flashed in the grass, and was looking at her face therein with such anxiety as might move one at once to tears and laughter, to see if the dew had washed her white.

But Mary Cavendish ceased all in a minute her mirth, and went up to the black child and took the mirror from her, and said, in the sweetest voice of pity I ever heard, “’Tis not in one May dew nor two, nor perchance in the dews of many years, you can wash your face white, but sometime it will be.”

Then the black wench burst into tears, and begged in that thick, sluggishly sweet tongue of hers to know if ever the May dew would wash her black away, and Mistress Mary answered as seriously as if she were in the pulpit on the Sabbath day that it would sometime most surely and she should see her face in the glass as fair as any.

Then the two maids, Mary Cavendish and Cicely Hyde, went into the house, and left me, as I said before, to wonder at that spirit of youth which can all in a minute disregard care and anxiety and risk of death for the play of vanity.  But, after all, which be stronger, wars and rumours of wars or vanity?  And which be older, and which fathered the other?

After the house door had shut behind the maidens, I too went out, but not to wash my grim man’s face in May dew, but rather for a stroll in the morning air, and the clearing of my wits for reflection; for much I wondered what course I should take regarding my discovery of the night before.  I went down the road toward Jamestown, and struck into the path to the wharf, the same that we had taken the day before, but there were no masts of the Golden Horn rising among the trees with a surprise of straightness.  She had weighed anchor and sailed away over night, and possibly before.  The more I reflected the more I understood that Mistress Mary Cavendish, with