“Nay. Your longing for a place you may call your own, and have your kine and poultry and all that about you, marries so well with a thought I’ve been turning over and over in my mind for a month or more, that I’ll e’en give it you now, and Manomet and the furmety may wait another ten minutes, or so.” “Well, then, let me but take my knitting”-- “No. You shall do naught but listen, and you shall sit where you are! For once I’ll have your whole mind”-- “For once, Myles!” “Ay, for once,--look as grieved as you may out of those eyen of yours! Well enough do you know that Alick, and little Myles, and now Mistress Lora have well-nigh pushed their poor old dad out of their mother’s heart”-- “Myles! Dost really think it, love?” The captain held his wife as far from him as her seat upon his knee would allow, and eagerly read her fair troubled face, her tender blushes, quivering lips, and lovely, loving eyes, where the tears stood and yet were restrained from falling--read and read as men devour with incredulous eyes some voucher of almost incredible good fortune. Then he slowly said,-- “Truly God has been very good to me, my wife. His name be praised.” It was a rare aspiration from those bearded lips, not innocent of the strange oaths and fierce objurgation well known to the soldiery of that day,--‘our army in Flanders,’--and over Barbara’s face came a look of such joy and peace as transformed its quiet comeliness to true beauty. But it was she who with woman’s tact dropped a veil over that moment’s exaltation before it should degenerate into commonplace. “What is your plan, dear?” asked she, and her husband, with a half-conscious feeling of relief, drew a long breath, and said,-- “Oh--yes. Well, Bab, I, as well as you, would be content to live a little farther from some of our townsfolk; it is not here as it was at first, or even when you came. Then we were all of one mind and one interest, and if I could not belong to their church as they call it, at least I respected their beliefs, and they let mine alone. But now, amid all this bickering with Lyford and Oldhame”-- “But Oldhame has gone, and so has Lyford, and are forbidden to come hither again,” interposed Barbara, and her husband slowly and dubiously replied, “I know, Bab, I know; but for all that somewhat of ill feeling in the town has grown out of that affair, and though there’s no man on God’s earth so near to me as William Bradford, and none I reverence more than the Elder, or had rather smoke a pipe with than Surgeon Fuller, there are others that are to my temper like a red rag to a bull, and it’s safer all round that we should not day by day be forced to rub shoulders. So the long and short on’t is, Bab, for I’m not good at speechifying, it needs Winslow for that, I have spoken to Bradford about taking possession of that sightly hill across the bay”-- “The one you fired a cannon at, the other day?” interrupted Barbara slyly.