Constance carolled as she hung up her cloak, her heart leaping in rapture of gratitude. Nor did Dame Eliza reprove her carol, but half smiled as Oceanus crowed and beat a pan wildly with his Christmas horse. CHAPTER XIX A Fault Confessed, Thereby Redressed As the winter wore away, that second winter in Plymouth colony that proved so hard to endure, the new state of things in the Hopkins household continued. Constance could not understand her stepmother. Though the long habit of a lifetime could not be at once entirely abandoned, yet Dame Eliza scolded far less, and toward Constance herself maintained an attitude that was far from fault-finding. Indeed she managed to combine something like regretful deference that was not unlike liking, with a rigid keeping of her distance from the girl. Constance wondered what had come over Mistress Hopkins, but she was too thankful for the peace she enjoyed to disturb it by the least attempt to bridge the distance that Dame Eliza had established between them. Her father and Giles were a daily delight to Constance. The comradeship that they had been so happy in when Giles was a child was theirs again, increased and deepened by the understanding that years had enabled Giles and his father to share as one man with another. And added to that was wistful affection, as if the older man and the younger one longed to make up by strength of love for the wasted days when all had not been right between them. Constance watched them together with gladness shining upon her face. Dame Eliza also watched them, but with an expression that Constance could not construe. Certain it was that her stepmother was not happy, not sure of herself, as she had always been. Oceanus was not well; he did not grow strong and rosy as did the other _Mayflower_ baby, Peregrine White, though Oceanus was by this time walking and talking--a tall, thin, reed-like little baby, fashioned not unlike the long grasses that grew on Plymouth harbour shore. But Damaris had come back to health. She was Constance's charge; her mother yielded her to Constance and devoted herself to the baby, as if she had a presentiment of how brief a time she was to keep him. It was a cruelly hard winter; except that there was not a second epidemic of mortal disease it was harder to the exiles than the first winter in Plymouth. Hunger was upon them, not for a day, a week, or a month, but hourly and on all the days that rose and set upon the lonely little village, encompassed by nothing kinder than reaches of marsh, sand, and barrens that ended in forest; the monotonous sea that moaned against their coast and separated them from food and kin; and the winter sky that often smiled on them sunnily, it is true, but oftener was coldly gray, or hurling upon them bleak winds and driving snows.