When the merchant arrived to seek their decision, it was made, and in favour of his wish. A pillion or padded seat was obtained from some neighbouring farm, and belted behind the saddle of the merchant’s man. Thereon, with a small fardel in her hand, which held all her worldly goods and gear, mounted Thomasine Bonaventure, while all the villagers came around to bid her farewell--all but one, and it was her cousin John. He had gone, as he had told her, to the moor, and there among the branches of the tree which marked the greeting-place of Master Bunsby the youth waited to watch her out of sight. He lifted up his hand and waved it as she passed on with a gesture of warning, but which she interpreted and returned as a silent caress. The travellers arrived at their journey’s end after being only a fortnight on the road--a speed so satisfactory and unusual, that it was Dame Bunsby’s emphatic remark that she verily thought they must have flown. Her mistress received Thomasine with a kind and hearty welcome, and ratified, by her everyday approval, her husband’s choice of the Cornish maid. When she was first told that her name was Bonaventure, and her husband explained that it signified good luck, she said, “Well, sweetheart, when I was a girl they used to say that the name was a fore-sign of the life, and God grant that thine may turn out [so] to be.” Time passed on, and in a year or two the wild Cornish lass had grown into a frame of thorough symmetry, firmness, and health. Her strong thews, of country origin, rendered her capable of long and active labour, and she had acquired with gradual ease the habits and appliances of city life. She was very soon the favoured and the favourite manager of the household. Her mistress, born and reared in a town, had been long a frail and delicate woman; and life in London in those days, as now, was fraught with the manifold perils of pestilent disease. To one of those ancient scourges of the population, the sweating-sickness, Dame Bunsby succumbed. Her death drew nigh, and, with the touching simplicity of the times, she told her true and tender husband, with smiling tears, that she thought he could not do better than, if they so agreed, to put Thomasine in her place when she was gone. “Tell her it was my last wish.”