till she reached her home and silenced her song with a kiss on eager Damaris's cheek. CHAPTER XIV Light-Minded Man, Heavy-Hearted Master Constance Hopkins sat at the side of the cave-like fireplace; opposite to where her father, engrossed in a heavy, much-rubbed, leather-bound book, toasted his feet beside the fire, as was his nightly wont. He was too deeply buried in his reading to heed her presence, but the girl felt keenly that her father was there and that she had him quite to herself. The consciousness of this made her heart sing softly in her breast, with a contentment that she voiced in the softest humming, not unlike the contented song of the kettle on the crane, and the purring of the cat, who sat with infolded paws between her human friends. Puck, the small spaniel, and Hecate, the powerful mastiff, who had come with the Hopkins family on the _Mayflower_, shared the hearth with Lady Fair, the cat, a right that their master insisted upon for them, but which Dame Eliza never ceased to inveigh against. However, Dame Eliza had gone to attend upon a sick neighbour that night, a fact which Hecate had approvingly noted, with her deep-grooved eyelids half-open, and in which Constance, no less than Puck and Hecate, rejoiced. There was the quintessence of domestic joy in thus sitting alone opposite her father, free from the sense of an unsympathetic element dividing them, in watching the charring of the tremendous back log, and the lovely colours in the salt-soaked small sticks under and over it which had been cast up by the sea and gathered on the beach for this consumption. Damaris and baby Oceanus were tucked away asleep for the night. It was as if once more Constance were a child in England with her widowed father, and no second marriage had ever clouded their perfect oneness. So Constance hummed softly, not to disturb the reader, the content that she felt not lessened by anxiety for Giles; there were hours in which she was assured of Giles's safe return, and this was one of them. Stephen Hopkins had been conscious of his girl's loving companionship, though not aware that he felt it, till, at last, the small tune that she hummed crept through his brain into his thought, and he laid down his book to look at her. She sat straight and prim by necessity. Her chair was narrow and erect--a carved, dark oaken chair, with a small round seat; it had been Constance's mother's, and had come out of her grandfather's Tudor mansion, wherein he had once entertained Queen Bess. Constance's dress was of dark homespun stuff, coming up close under her soft chin, falling straight around her feet, ornamented but with narrow bands of linen at her neck and around her wrists. Yet by its extreme severity the Puritan gown said: "See how lovely this young creature is! Only her fleckless skin, her gracious outlines, could triumph over my barrenness!"