Constance invented a question that must be asked Elder Brewster because she knew that the girls, though they revered him, feared him, and never willingly went where they must reply to his gravely kind attempts at conversation with them. "I surely feel like a wicked hypocrite," sighed Constance, watching her friends away as she turned toward the house that sheltered the elder. "What would dear little Humility say if she knew I had tried to get rid of her? Or Elizabeth either! But it isn't as though I had not wanted them for a less good reason. I do love them dearly! I must meet Giles and hear his news as soon as I can, and it can't be told before another. Mercy upon us, what _was_ it that I had thought of to ask Elder Brewster! I've forgotten every syllable of it! Well, mercy upon us! And suppose he sees me hesitating here! I know! I'll confess to him that I was wishing I was in Warwickshire hearing Eastertide alleluias sung in my cousins' church, and ask him if it was sinful. He loves to correct me, dear old saint!" Dimpling with mischief Constance turned her head away from a possible onlooker in the house to pull her face down into the proper expression for a youthful seeker for guidance. Then, quite demure and serious, with downcast eyes, she turned and went into the house. Elder William Brewster kept her some time. She was nervously anxious to escape, fearing to miss the boys' arrival. But Elder Brewster was deeply interested in pretty Constance Hopkins, in whom, in spite of her sweet docility and patient daily performance of her hard tasks, he discerned glimpses of girlish liveliness that made him anxious and which he felt must be corrected to bring the dear girl into perfection. Constance decided that she was expiating fully whatever fault there might have been in feigning an errand to Elder Brewster to get rid of the girls as she sat uneasily listening to that good man's exposition of the value of alleluias in the heart above those sung in church, and the baseness of allowing the mind to look back for a moment at the "shackles from which she was freed." Good Elder Brewster ended by reading from his roughened brown leather-covered Bible the story of Lot's wife to which Constance--who had heard it many times, it being an appropriate theme for the pilgrim band to ponder, sick in heart and body as they had been so long--did not harken. At last she was dismissed with a fatherly hand laid on her shining head, and a last warning to keep in mind how favoured above her English cousins she had been to be chosen a daughter in Israel to help found a kingdom of righteousness. Constance ran like the wind down the road, stump-bordered, the beginning of a street, and came down upon the beach just as the boys reached it and their boat bumped up on the sand under the last three hard pulls they had given the oars in unison. "Oh! Giles, oh, Giles, oh Jack!" cried Constance fairly dancing under her excitement.