“A poor bargain indeed!” retorted Gillian, her temper flaming up; and as John Alden’s boat was over from Duxbury she begged a passage in it, and an hour later was on her way to visit Betty Pabodie, as she pretended, but really to torment Sarah Brewster, who felt that she had no right to refuse her willful kinswoman shelter whenever she claimed it. A few days later Cromwell sailed for Boston, where he remained for some months, presented Governor Winthrop with an elegant sedan-chair, taken out of one of his prizes, and was much admired and petted. Whether Gillian joined him there and was openly married to him, or whether the innate romance pervasive of the sea moved Cromwell to plan and execute an elopement for the girl, whose relatives would have been only too glad to give her to any worthy husband, we cannot tell; but that in some way they at last came together is evident, and also that they were married, since she was allowed to inherit his property. The manner of his death was one of those marvels which men then regarded as a direct judgment from heaven, but which we moderns are content to call a strange coincidence. It was in the late autumn, and Cromwell, after a merry feast at the house of a boon companion in Dorchester, was riding rapidly homeward, when his horse slipped upon an icy slope, and threw his rider violently over his head. The night passed, and in the morning a wayfarer found the faithful beast standing pensive and patient beside his master’s prostrate body, now cold and stiff; and when he was brought into the town and carried to his lodgings a wild-eyed woman rushed to meet him, and staring at the wound whence his lifeblood had drained away, shrieked, “’Tis Voysye’s hurt over again,” and fell in a swoon across the body. John Higgins, who had followed his captain’s body home, started in terror at that word, and coming forward drew away the hair from the wound, stared at it as Gillian had done, and hoarsely asked,-- “Was’t Voysye’s spook did it?” “Nay, man,” impatiently answered the man who had found him. “See you not that ’twas the hilt of the poor gentleman’s own rapier did it? When I came upon him, the brass was bedded in the wound, and you may see the blood and hairs upon it now. See!” “Ay, I see,” replied Higgins heavily. “And well do I know, without seeing, whose hand it was that urged the hilt to just that spot upon my poor captain’s head. Wow! But I wish I might have seen the tussle that befell when the old man got free of his carcase and fell upon Voysye man to man; nay, spook to spook. Would they still be at it, think you?” In a month or so more, Gillian, a very wealthy young widow, sailed for England, where she married a pious and passing rich old Covenanter, whom she also survived, and became one of the gayest and least prejudiced ladies of the Court of Charles the Second, where we will leave her. CHAPTER XXXV. CANARY WINE AND SEED-CAKE.