to be a very bridal of Atalanta, and feast of the Lapithae; and poor
Mr. Will Cary (who always blurted out the truth), when old Salterne once
asked him angrily in Bideford Market, "What a plague business had he
making sheep's eyes at his daughter?" broke out before all bystanders,
"And what a plague business had you, old boy, to throw such an apple of
discord into our merry meetings hereabouts? If you choose to have such
a daughter, you must take the consequences, and be hanged to you." To
which Mr. Salterne answered with some truth, "That she was none of his
choosing, nor of Mr. Cary's neither." And so the dor being given, the
belligerents parted laughing, but the war remained in statu quo; and
not a week passed but, by mysterious hands, some nosegay, or languishing
sonnet, was conveyed into The Rose's chamber, all which she stowed away,
with the simplicity of a country girl, finding it mighty pleasant; and
took all compliments quietly enough, probably because, on the authority
of her mirror, she considered them no more than her due.

And now, to add to the general confusion, home was come young Amyas
Leigh, more desperately in love with her than ever. For, as is the
way with sailors (who after all are the truest lovers, as they are the
finest fellows, God bless them, upon earth), his lonely ship-watches
had been spent in imprinting on his imagination, month after month, year
after year, every feature and gesture and tone of the fair lass whom he
had left behind him; and that all the more intensely, because, beside
his mother, he had no one else to think of, and was as pure as the day
he was born, having been trained as many a brave young man was then,
to look upon profligacy not as a proof of manhood, but as what the old
Germans, and those Gortyneans who crowned the offender with wool, knew
it to be, a cowardly and effeminate sin.