“What! what!” stammered he, half affrighted lest the girl had lost her senses. “You love some one already!” “Oh, father, so much, so dearly! ’Tis for that I love to go and sit all alone there upon the brow of the hill, where I may see the beauty He has made and gaze away and away into the heavens where He lives. Sure the hills of Judah were not so lovely as this place, and who can tell but some day He may descend and stand visibly upon them”-- “Aha!” breathed the captain, stopping short and gazing appalled upon the face of the girl, set seaward, with a half smile upon its lips and a look of yearning love in the unfathomable eyes. But as he gazed she turned, and throwing an arm around his neck hid her face upon his breast with a sobbing sigh. “Oh, father dear, I’m sorry I tried to speak about what no words can tell. Don’t talk to mother or to any one, will you, dear, and please do not ask me again. ’Tis so precious and so wonderful, and ’tis all the love I ever want beyond my home loves. You won’t talk about it, daddy dear, will you?” “One word, Lora. You mean that your love is given to God alone?” “To Him who loved me and gave Himself for me--to Him who is chief among ten thousand and altogether lovely--to the King in his beauty in the land that is very far off.” “My child, my child!” groaned the father, drawing the girl’s form close to his thickly beating heart and pressing his lips upon her brow, while Jephthah’s agony turned him sick and white, and his eyes rose with an almost angry protest to the skies. CHAPTER XXVI. GILLIAN. The apple-bee at Jonathan Brewster’s house by the Eagle’s Tree, where The Nook merges into Harden Hill, was in full tide, and one could hear the merry voices of men and maidens, and the cheerful shrilling of matrons talking above the din, before one reached the house. Beneath a clump of trees surrounding the great cedar known as the Eagle’s Tree a number of horses were tied with comfortable measures of corn and trusses of hay before them, and in the little cove lay half a dozen or so boats uneasily tumbling upon the incoming tide. These conveyances had brought the remoter dwellers in the new town of Duxbury and its neighborhood: the Aldens from Eagle Tree Pond, the De la Noyes from Stony Brook, the Soules from Powder Point, the Constant Southworths from North River, the Howlands from Island Creek, the Bassetts from Beaver Pond, and the Abraham Samsons from Bluefish River where they lived neighbors to the Aldens and intermarried with them.