For the purposes of romance, fathers and mothers are often much in the way; and the poet and the romancer, with a reckless disregard of the life and safety of Mr. William Mullins, her respected parent, represent Priscilla as orphaned while her father was yet alive. It was to Mr. Mullins that John Alden, torn between duty and passion, and doubtless pale with suffering, presented the Captain’s claims. If the matter was urged rather perfunctorily, Mr. Mullins seems not to have noticed it, as he gave his ready consent. But we may be confident that Priscilla did; and that, after all, maidenly delicacy would never have suffered her to utter her historic words, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?” if the deadly sinking of his heart had not been evident in his downcast face. Does it need any chronicle to tell us what a flame of joy shot through John Alden’s heart at the instant of those words,—what an icy wave of despair quenched it,—what a horror of shame overcame Priscilla till her blushes became a pain? For when she had dared so much, and dared in vain, what else but shame could be her portion? They must have been dark days that followed for the two young lovers. Can you not see John Alden trying to walk away his trouble on the stretch of the long beach, to escape his sense of treachery, his sorrow in his friend’s displeasure, his joy and his shame together? “There, my cloak about my face, Up and down the sands I’d pace, Making footprints for the spray To wash away. . . . . . . “Up and down the barren beaches, Round the ragged belts of land, In along the curving reaches, Out along the horns of sand.” [Illustration] [Illustration: “Her respected parent”] There, too, came Priscilla, without much doubt, when the closeness of the little cluster of log huts, within a few feet of one another, grew too oppressive, or the notion that others looked askance at her, lest in any recklessness of desperation the Captain, the mainstay of the colony, threw his life away in the daily expeditions he undertook,—came not as girls stroll along the shore to gather shells, to write their names on the sand, to pick up the seaweed with hues like those “Torn from the scarfs and gonfalons of Kings Who dwell beneath the waters,” as very likely she had done ere this, but to forget her trouble, to diffuse and lose it. For here, added to homesickness and horror and impending famine, was a new trouble, worse perhaps than all the rest. If her lover had been lost at sea, she might have watched for his sail, “And hope at her yearning heart would knock When a sunbeam on a far-off rock Married a wreath of wandering foam.” [Illustration: “There too came Priscilla”] [Illustration: “Ponds set like jewels on the ring of the green woods”]