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.”