“Let one ship go there and come back safe,” they said. “Let us hear that only ordinary storms and ordinary dangers will assail us on such a voyage and that by the Southern stars we can steer as straight a course as by our good Dipper and North Star. Then we will set sail with a right good will!” So the voyage began with only a few bold-hearted seamen on board and with Gerald Radpath standing at the ship’s stern, watching, as far as he could see, the brave little figure on the hillside that waved good-bye as long as loving eyes could span that ever widening distance. “We will not make his going hard, Stephen, by showing him our tears,” said Clotilde, at last, as she took up her boy in her arms and made her way with slow, dragging steps back to the house. Would she ever, she wondered, stand there to watch come in the ship that now seemed sailing away for all time? Almost from the moment that the Mistress Margeret sank below the horizon, Clotilde could see that the feeling toward Gerald was beginning to change. “Your good husband, madam, Heaven send that he come back safe!” were words that she used to hear often as she went about the town. “My grandfather began his fortunes as cabin boy to good Master Roger Bardwell,” said one of the housewives to her, “and I hope my son will sail some day with Master Radpath.” And one old sailor, who had begged hard to go with Gerald but had been reluctantly left behind on account of his age and feebleness, said the best thing of all. “I told ’em, mistress, many a time, that the lad had Simon Radpath’s blood in him and a good spirit of his own besides, and I said he would show it yet. Now the blind ones are beginning to see.” There was but a single person who did not seem to have a higher regard for Gerald now that he was gone. This was Agnes Twitchell, whose bridegroom husband had shipped as mate on the Mistress Margeret. “We were but three months married,” she cried to Clotilde, who had come to see her, but who was not allowed to enter her cottage door. “Your husband took my man from me and they will never come back. You were a wicked woman to let him do so; why did you not keep him safe at home?” “Were you able to keep your husband when he thought that he must go?” Clotilde asked, and Agnes shook her head. “Then why think you that I could keep mine either, or that I was less unhappy than you at the thought of his going? Try to have courage and think of the day when they come back.” “That will never be!” sobbed the other, and she ran inside, slamming the door when her visitor would have followed to comfort her. The days passed so slowly that it did, indeed, seem at times as though the period of waiting would never have an end. “Nine—ten—eleven months we may be gone,” Gerald had said, “and should the time lengthen to a year you are not to be afraid.”