Lady De La Ware smiled, too. She had been told something about the Indian customs.

"Perhaps some day thou shalt take me to thy father's court; but now I am come to take thee to that of our Queen. She hath expressed her desire to see thee shortly. A letter which was written her by Captain John Smith about thee hath made her all the more eager to do honour to one who hath ever befriended the English."

"Captain John Smith hath written to the Queen about me?" said Pocahontas, marvelling.

"In truth, and since his words seemed to me worthy of remembrance, I have kept them in my mind." He begins:

"'If ingratitude be a deadly poyson to all honest vertues, I must be guiltie of that crime if I should omit any meanes to be thankfull. So it is that some ten years ago being in Virginia, and taken prisoner by the power of Powhatan, their chief King, I received from this great savage exceeding great courtesy, especially from his son, Nautauquas, the most manliest, comeliest, boldest spirit I ever saw in a savage, and his sister, Pocahontas, the King's most dear and well beloved daughter, being but a child of twelve or thirteen years of age, whose compassionate pitiful heart, of my desperate estate, gave me much cause to respect her—she hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine ... the most and least I can do is to tell you this, because none so oft tried it as myself, and the rather being of so great a spirit, however her stature, if she should not be well received, seeing this Kingdom may rightly have a Kingdom by her means—' And much more there was, Lady Rebecca, which I cannot now recall."

Lady De La Ware did not know that Pocahontas believed Smith dead, and Pocahontas, not imagining anything else, thought Smith must have written this letter from Jamestown before he died; and her heart grew warm thinking how, even dying, he had done what he could for her happiness on the mere chance of her going to England. The truth of the matter was that Smith was then at Plymouth, making ready to start on an expedition to New England; and though he did not expect to see Pocahontas, he wished England, and first of all England's Queen, to know what they owed this Indian girl.

It happened not long after that "La Belle Sauvage," as the Londoners sometimes called Pocahontas, and Rolfe were being entertained at a fair country seat. An English girl, much of the age of her guest, whose curiosity about the ways of the Indians was restrained only by her courtesy, had been showing her through the beautiful old garden. They had talked of Virginia, and Mistress Alicia coaxed:

"Wilt thou not take me with thee. Lady Rebecca, when thou returnest thither?

"But see," and she peered through an opening in the high yew hedge, "yonder cometh Master Rolfe with a party of gentlemen. Oh! one of them is a brave figure of a man, though he weareth not such fine clothes as some of the others. By my troth! 'tis Captain John Smith, and of course he cometh to greet thee. I would I might stay to hear what ye two old friends have to say to each other."

It seemed to Pocahontas that hours elapsed during the few minutes she was alone after Mistress Alicia left her, while her husband was guiding her guests to her through the garden's winding mazes. How could Smith be alive when she knew that he was dead? Even as she caught in the distance the sound of his voice, she asked herself if in truth she had ever heard of his death from anyone but the councillors in Jamestown.