"Captain Myles come back!" cried Constance, with a laugh that she was delighted to hear sounded genuine. "Why, silly little Rose Standish, don't you know nothing could keep the captain from coming back? Wouldn't it be a sorry day for an Indian, or for any beast, when he attacked our right arm of the colony? No fear of him not coming back to us! And how to go on, is that it? In your own cozy little house, with Prissy and the rest of us to help you look after it till you are strong again, and then the fair spring sunshine, and the salt winds straight from home blowing upon you, and you will not need to know how to go on! It will be the rest of us who will have to learn how to keep up with you!" "Kind Constance," whispered Rose, stroking the girl's cheek and looking wistfully into her eyes as she dried her own. "You keep me up, though you are so young! Not for nothing were you named Constantia, for constant indeed you are! I will be good, and not trouble you. Usually I feel sure that I shall get well, but to-day--seeing Myles go----. Sometimes it comes over me with terrible certainty that it is not for me to see this wilderness bloom." "Just tiredness, dear one," said Constance, lovingly, and as if she were a whole college of learned physicians. "Have no fear." Mistress Hopkins came in search of them, carrying the baby Oceanus with manifest protest against his weight and wailing. "I have been looking for you, Constantia," she said, as if this were a severe accusation against the girl. "You are to take this child. Have I not enough to do and to put up with that I must be worn threadbare by his crying? And what a country! Your father has been tormenting me with his mending and preparation for this expedition so that I have not seen it as it is until just now. Look at it, only look at it! What a place to bring a decent woman to who has never wanted! Though I may not have been the fine lady that his first wife was, yet am I a comfortable farmer's daughter, and Stephen Hopkins should not have brought me to a coast more bleak and dismal than the barrens of Sahara. Woods, nothing but woods! And full of lions, and tigers, and who knows what other raving, raging wild vermin--who knows? What does thy father mean by bringing me to this?" Constance pressed her lips together hard, a burning crimson flooding her face as she took the baby violently thrust upon her and straightened his disordered wrappings, reminding herself that his mother was not his fault. "Why as to that, Mistress Hopkins," said Priscilla Mullins in her downright, sensible way, "Mr. Hopkins did not bring you. We all came willingly, and I make no doubt that all of us knew quite well that it was a wilderness to which we were bound."