"Do you want to help it, if by helping you mean altering, Connie?" asked Captain Myles, with a twinkle. "No, child, you surely cannot help all these things which come by no will of yours, but by the will of God. And I am your witness that you are ever patient and dutiful. Bear as best you can, sweet Constantia, and by and by the wrong will become right, as right in the end is ever strongest. I cannot endure to see your young eyes wet with tears called out by unkindness. There is enough and to spare of hard matters to endure for all of us on this adventure not to add to it what is not only unnecessary, but unjust. Cheer up, Con, my lass! It's a long lane--in England!--that has no turning, and it's a long voyage on the seas that ends in no safe harbour! And do you know, Connie girl, that there's soon to be a turn in this bright weather? There's a feeling of change and threatening in this soft wind." Constance wiped her eyes and smiled, knowing that the captain wished to lead her into other themes than her own troubles, the discussion of which was, after all, useless. "I don't know about the weather, except the weather I'm having," she said. "Ah, I don't want it to storm, not on the mid-seas, Captain Myles." "Aye, but it's the mid-seas of the year, Connie, when the days and nights are one in length, and at that time old wise men say a storm is usually forthcoming. We'll weather it, never fear! If we are bearing westward a great hope and mission as we all believe--not I in precisely the same fashion as these stricter saints, but in my own way no less--then we are sure to reach our goal, my dear," said the captain cheerfully. "Sometimes I lose faith; I think I am wicked," sighed Constance. "We are all poor miserable sinners! Even the English Church which we have cast off and consigned to perdition, puts that confession into our mouths," said Captain Myles, with another twinkle, and was gratified that Constance's laugh rang out in response to his thinly veiled mischief. Captain Standish proved to be a true prophet. On the second day after he had announced to Constance the coming change in weather it came. The _Mayflower_ ran into a violent storm, seas and wind were wild, the small ship tossed on the crest of billows and plunged down into the chasm between them as they reared high above her till it seemed impossible that she should hold together, far less hold her course. In truth she did not hold to her course, but fell off it before the storm, groaning in every beam as if with fearful grief at her own danger, and at the likelihood of destroying by her destruction the hope, the tremendous mission which she bore within her. The women and children cowered below in their crowded quarters--lacking air, space, every comfort--numb with the misery of sickness and the threat of imminent death.