She did not grant her forgiveness until several years later, after due savoring of sad, black-bordered letters from Emmie, imploring kindness. Her husband, after a brief illness, was dead; her little boy and she were left alone, without anything in the world. She acknowledged her fault so humbly; she owned so freely that her marriage had been excessively--deservedly--wretched; she longed so desperately to be taken back into her old home, that Lucretia found herself relenting. Her daughters were now married and lived at a distance; she felt daily more and more the need of a female companion. Her son, after reading the young widow's pitiful appeals, protested that it would be inhuman to refuse her a shelter. It was decided that she should be allowed to come, and in time the big, blunt Gregory, of whom she had been afraid in old days, went a long stretch of the journey to meet her, for that had seemed to him requisite, though to his mother superfluous. He even crossed the arm of sea that she must presently be crossing, with no apparent purpose but to cross it again with her. When the boat was well out at sea and the passengers had disposed themselves in patience about the deck, he marched up and down, as did several of the others, and, while avoiding to look like one in search, sought diligently the remembered face of his cousin. It was a cheerless gray day. The sea was quiet; the boat pitched but slightly. He was not long unsuccessful; when he had satisfied himself that she was not in the crowd on the windside, he went to lee and saw her sitting almost alone. She might have gone there for warmth. She did not seem to notice that cinders and fine soot were raining down upon her. He found himself disinclined to accost her at once; he went to lean where he could watch her without pointed appearance of curiosity. She looked mournful in her black things--not the new, crisp crape of well-to-do bereavement, but a poor gentlewoman's ordinary shabby black. Her cheeks had lost their pretty roundness; the effect of her eyes was more than ever melancholy. The pale little face, set in its faint-colored hair, framed in its black bonnet, might pass a hundred times unnoticed: it had little to arrest the attention; but attention, by whatever chance once secured, must be followed by a gentle, compassionate interest in the breast of the beholder. This emotion felt Gregory. She sat on one of the ship's benches, hugging her black wrap about her, hiding in it her little gloveless hands. A bundle was on her lap, at her feet a large bag. She looked wearily off over the crumpled leaden plain, and now and then called: "Dorastus! Dorastus!"