es are Barbara and Alice."

"But yet she never told thee that she loved her cousin? Now that is
passing strange."

"'T would to my mind have been far stranger had she so bewrayed
herself."

"But still those gentle eyes of thine read the secret of her heart?"

"I did mistrust it for long, but when I had thy letter, Will, and
settled my mind to come to thee, I told Barbara somewhat of the old
story"--

"Of how thou wast minded to spite thy comely face by cutting off its
nose?"

But Mistress Bradford had no smile for her husband's somewhat coarse
jest, and went quietly on,--

"And I told her, too, that her kinsman, Myles, had lost the sweet wife
of whom she had so often and so gently spoken; and at the last I told
her I was minded to sell all that I had and go to our folk in New
England, and I asked her would she go, to be ever and always my dear
sister if no other home should offer, and though we said no word that
day of Captain Standish, sure am I that he was in both our minds. And
now, dear man, dost see through the millstone?"

"Ay, since woman's wit hath delved a hole, I can see through it as well
as another." And the governor kissed his wife as merrily as another man,
while she adjusting the demure matron's cap about her fair young face
went out to see that the breakfast was fairly spread.

A fortnight later when the Anne had sailed, and the Little James had
returned and gone again upon a luckless fishing trip, and the new-comers
had settled into their appointed places, and the town was once more
quiet, there came a fair September day when work was laid aside, and
after breakfast the armies of the colony, at least a hundred souls in
all,--if we count the trumpeters, the buglers, the fifers, and the
drummers,--assembled on the Training Green just across the brook, and
after some evolutions marched in orderly array back again past the
spring and up the hill to the governor's house, where they were joined
by him and the elder. Then up and on to the captain's house, where a
guard of honor presented itself at the door, and ushered forth the
chief, carefully dressed in his uniform of state, while at his side
merrily clanked Gideon, resplendent, though none but he and his master
knew it, in such a furbishing and polishing as seldom had fallen to his
lot before.

Saluting his comrades gravely and with somewhat more of dignity than his
wont, the captain took his place, and the procession climbed the short
ascent