But this was more unbearable than loss: she had dishonored herself in his eyes; she had betrayed herself, and he had scorned her; and she came to the sea for the comfort which nearness to the vast and the infinite always gives. Even that was not solitude; for there, a mile away, lay the “Mayflower,” still at anchor, where the spy-glass made her prisoner, while it was not safe for a lonely girl to tread the shore at night, watching the glow of the evening star or the moonswale on the sea. Perhaps, with Mary Chilton by her side, or with some of the smaller children of the colony, she climbed a hill, protected by the minion and the other piece of ordnance, which were afterwards mounted on the roof of the rude church, and looked down over the cluster of cabins where now the fair town lies, and thought life hard and sorry, and longed, as John Alden himself did, for the shelter of Old England. Perhaps she had no time for lovesick fancies, anyway, in the growing sickness among the people, which tasked the strength and love of all; and when, watching with the sick at night, she thrust aside a casement latticed with oiled paper, or chanced to go outside the door for fresh water to cool a fevered lip, she saw a planet rising out of the sea, or the immeasurable universe of stars wheeling overhead, over desolate shore, and water, and wilderness, she felt her own woe too trivial to be dwelt upon; and when on the third of March her father died and was laid in the field where the wheat was planted over the level graves for fear of the Indians, we may be sure that she saw her trouble as part of the cross she was to bear, and waited in patience and meekness either till the rumor came of the death of Miles Standish in the Indian skirmish,—of which we know nothing,—or till John Alden had made it up with his conscience and found his chance, not in the crowded little log huts, not on the open shore, but within the leafy covert of the freshly springing woodside, with none but the fallow deer to see them, to put an end to her unrest. [Illustration: “First happened on the Mayflower”] [Illustration: The blushing Sabbatia]