“Yet surely, Master Marlowe, you contemplate no—”
“Nay,” he rejoined, with a vague smile; “I shackle the Fates with their own thread for but a single day, and not forever.” Turning, he walked away on the margin of the wheat-field that now, no longer golden, swayed and whispered beneath an umbrous pall; and Eleanor, seeming to be bound by the spell of his mysticism, could only watch in silence his graceful, receding figure while the tall wheat-blades bent forward and touched him as he passed. When at last he was about to disappear, she would have started after him, but at this instant Virginia, flitting as though from nowhere to her mother’s side, called out to him, “Come back!” He turned. “Please, Master Kyt, come back and tell me the secret.”
But Marlowe only shook his head, and, waving his hand, went forward with light footsteps into the woods.
CHAPTER XXI
“It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overrul’d by fate.”
—Marlowe, in Hero and Leander.
As the poet made his way through the forest he came suddenly on a scene that caused him to pause, laugh, quicken his pace, and turn aside to another trail, by which he reached the shore. Here, shrugging his shoulders, he sat down on the sand, looking back now and then as if waiting to be joined by some one who occupied his thoughts. Whether or not this person would come he could not be sure, since the scene just witnessed had disclosed a new phase of the situation in which he had placed himself.