Toward Giles she held herself kindly, yet never showed him affection. But toward Constance her manner was what might be called eagerly affectionate, as if she so longed to prove her love for the girl that the limitations of speech and opportunity left her unsatisfied of expression. Hunger was the portion of everyone in Plymouth; conditions had grown harder with longer abiding there, except in the one--though that was important--matter of the frightful epidemic of the first winter. In spite of want Constance grew lovelier as she grew older. She was now a full-grown woman, tall with the slenderness of early youth. Her scant rations did not give her the gaunt look that most of the pilgrims, even the young ones, wore as they went on working hard and eating little. Instead, it etherealized and spiritualized Constance's beauty. Under her wonderful eyes, with their far-off look of a dreamer warmed and corrected by the light in them of love and sacrifice, were shadows that increased their brilliance. The pallor that had replaced the wild-rose colour in her cheeks did not lessen the exquisite fairness of her skin, and it set in sharp contrast to it the redness of her lips and emphasized their sweetness. Dame Eliza watched her with a sort of awe, and Damaris was growing old enough to offer to her sister's beauty the admiration that was apart from her adoring love for that sister. "Connie would set London afire, Stephen Hopkins," said Dame Eliza to her husband one day. "Why not send her over to her cousins in Warwickshire, to your first wife's noble kindred, and let her come into her own? It seems a sinful thing to keep her here to fade and wane where no eye can see her." "This from you, Eliza!" cried Stephen Hopkins, honestly surprised, but feigning to be shocked. "Nay but you and I have changed roles! Never was I the Puritan you are, yet have I seen enough of the world to know that it hath little to offer my girl by way of peace and happiness, though it kneel before her offering her adulation on its salvers. Constance is safer here, and Plymouth needs her; she can give here, which is in very truth better than receiving; especially to receive the heartaches that the great world would be like to give one so lovely to attract its eye, so sensitive to its disillusionments. And as to wasted, wife, Con gives me joy, and you, too, and I think there is not one among us who does not drink in her loveliness like food, where actual food is short. Captain Myles and our doctor would be going lame and halt, and would feel blind, I make no doubt, did they not meet Constance Hopkins on their ways, like a flower of eglantine, fair and sweet, and for that matter look how she helps the doctor in his ministrations! Nay, nay, wife; we will keep our Plymouth maid, and I am certain there will come to her from across seas one day the romance and happiness that should be hers."