But the year passed, Spring came again and filled Master Simon’s garden with flowers, yet its winds blew no great merchant ship into the harbour. The roses bloomed and died, the midsummer crickets and katydids sang in the long grass, the autumn flowers opened and the maples and birches in the forest began to show their scarlet and yellow. “He will come, he will come!” Clotilde would cry fiercely to herself every day, but it had reached a point when she alone in all of Hopewell believed it. A foreign sailor coming in on an English vessel brought a tale of how, all the coast of Africa, a ship answering all descriptions of the _Mistress Margeret_ had been seen, drifting idly with all sail set and apparently no one on board. “Just a moment we saw her in the fog,” he said, “for the mist lifted and there she was like a picture, every sail hoisted and never a living soul in sight upon her decks. I doubt not she has gone to the bottom long before now.” Yet still Clotilde went on hoping. Agnes Twitchell wore black and openly mourned her husband as dead. She screamed after Clotilde upon the street one day and, when people sought to hush her, only cried out the louder. “Her husband murdered my good man,” she shrieked, frantic in her grief. “Shall I not then cry out to reproach her?” Probably the most cruel blow, however, was the one that Clotilde received one summer evening as she was working among the flowers with Stephen at her side. Two people, talking together, passed the gate. “That is Master Simon’s garden,” said one to the other, who must have been a stranger, and then the speaker added, not realising that Clotilde was close enough to hear: “It is there that the Widow Radpath dwells with her son.” So that was what they called her now! Clotilde’s hand closed over the branch of the rose vine that she was holding until the thorns tore her fingers, but she never noticed. “Mother, what is a widow?” asked Stephen, but he never learned, for she snatched him up in her arms and burst into a passion of tears. Every day, as the weather grew colder and autumn gales swept through the dead garden, she and Stephen spent long hours at the little round window of the stair-landing, looking and looking out to sea. “Why are you not watching, Mother?” Stephen would exclaim at times. “Your eyes are shut!” [Illustration: “Why are you not watching, Mother?”] “I was praying,” Clotilde would explain, “and that is better than watching, little son.” She had gone to sleep one windy night, listening to the heavy shutters rattling and to the threshing of the branches in the great trees outside, and had dreamed, as she always did in a storm, of high roaring waves and a good ship pounding upon cruel rocks. She awoke suddenly with the thunder of it still in her ears. But no, that noise was real, it was some one beating upon the great front door, striking frantic blows on the knocker in an effort to rouse the house.