All that they knew, these good people, was that about noon a Nantasket boat had rounded Beach Point, anchored in the channel, and sent a skiff ashore under command of William Gray, the elder of two brothers, representing the solid men of Nantasket at that day. Stepping on the Rock, Master Gray demanded to be led to the governor, a demand complied with the more readily that as he declined to communicate his business to any one else. Dinner-time came and went, and as the town returned to its posts of observation it noted William Gray rowing back to the vessel, receiving a passenger into his skiff, and bringing ashore the very John Oldhame whom Plymouth had so ignominiously dismissed some two years before. The same, and yet a very different John Oldhame from the drunken ruffler of that day, or the blustering bully who a year before that had been solemnly exiled from Plymouth; yes, a strangely meek and quiet John Oldhame this, who, looking neither to the right nor the left, strode up the hill to the Fort, apparently not noticing, certainly not resenting, the attendance of the two men-at-arms who escorted or guarded him, as one might elect to call it. So much had Plymouth seen, and Helena Billington, arms akimbo, and head inclined to one side, was beginning to vituperate the tyrants who had beguiled an unfortunate gentleman into their clutches, and now would clap him up in jail, when those very tyrants severally appeared coming out of their houses and leisurely climbing the hill. “The governor, and the Elder, and the captain, and the doctor, and Master Winslow, and Master Allerton,” counted she breathlessly, and not without a certain awe at sight of all the authority of the colony paraded before her eyes; and as the last doublet disappeared within the gate, she sagely shook her head, with the conclusion, “Well, gossip, it passeth my comprehension or thine, and I’ll e’en hie me under cover when it rains, for only a fool will stay out to get drenched.” From which somewhat blind apothegm we may perhaps evolve the theory that Goodwife Billington was not one of those whom our modern slang declares “don’t know enough to go in when it rains!” “Seat yourself an you will, Master Oldhame, and speak your errand,” repeated the governor a little more indulgently, for in fact Oldhame’s weather-and-timeworn face and somewhat bowed shoulders suggested ill health or great suffering, a look supplemented by his voice, as dropping upon the bench which young Allerton pushed forward he slowly said,-- “My thanks, Governor Bradford. I have come here to-day upon an errand so strange that I can scarce credit it myself, and I know not that in my half century of years I have ever charged myself with the like. “Man, it is to crave pardon for my ill offices to you, and these your associates, and to all the town of Plymouth, where I repaid kind entertainment and many good turns with as much of evil and malevolence. Can you, as Christian men, forgive me?”