“We will not tell my mother that I know,” he began, “and perhaps some day—but oh,” he broke off, “my thought was always to be a sailor like my father and my grandfather and my Cousin Amos, to sail mighty ships like the _Margeret_ to the farthest foreign ports. But now—I shall be fit only to launch such vessels as Peter sails.” His brave voice did not tremble but the hand in Branderby’s shook. “I have often seen children sailing such ships,” said the soldier, “and never see them without thinking, as many others do, how like they are to human lives. Some upset, some sink, some drift back and forth hugging the shore, while others spread their sails and put bravely forth to sea.” He pointed to where the little fleet of wind-tossed ships had scattered wide. Many of them had suffered mishap, even as the Sergeant had said, some had disappeared and some still clung to the shore. But Peter’s boat, the vessel of Stephen’s fashioning, had caught the wind and was skimming away toward the harbour’s mouth. The red of the dropping sun coloured its tiny white sails, its long shadow stretched across the green waters making it seem greater than it was, as with steady prow it bore away, bound, it seemed, for Spain or France or some magic country that no man knew. The rough old soldier’s hand closed tight on Stephen’s. “Whatever comes to you, boy,” he said; “whatever life brings to you of pain or disappointment or sorrow, of one thing I am certain. What your future will be, I may not know, for presently I will go back to England and we may never meet again. But whether your days are to be dark or bright ones, whether time is to bring you good or ill, of this I am sure, that the world will have need of you some day, and the ship that you launch will carry far.” CHAPTER XI FAIR MAIDS OF FRANCE In the end the old doctor was neither wholly right nor wholly wrong. Stephen was never again the square, sturdy lad that he had been before his terrible illness, but none the less he grew through an active boyhood and became a busy, useful man. If it ever was a bitter pain to him to see other boys swim and run and climb in a way that he could never do again, no one had known of it save perhaps his mother, or his good friend Sergeant Branderby who had so long ago returned to England. His hopes of being a soldier or a sailor were destroyed forever in that single moment when he slipped from the pine tree branch; instead he became a lawyer and made so brilliant a record that he should have had small time to grieve over vanished dreams.