“Oh, Will dear, which shall I praise first, your tender thought for me, or your goodness to my sister?”
“Well, for that matter, dame, I fancy it all comes under one head, for if it were not to pleasure you I know not that I should urge Mistress Carpenter across the seas to bear me company.”
“There’s a young gentlewoman below asking to see our dame,” said the voice of Tabitha Rowse at the door, and Alice, with a gentle look of love and thanks in her husband’s face, followed the girl downstairs, and entering the new parlor said pleasantly,—
“Oh, it is you, Mistress Gillian, is it? I should think Tabitha would have remembered you.”
“I have not been in Plymouth more than once or twice since the dear Elder’s funeral,” said Gillian sorrowfully.
“The dear Elder, yes,” replied Dame Alice. “He’s been mourned but once among us, for the first mourning hath not ceased, nor will it soon with those who knew and loved him.”
“Yet none loved him like me, for he was the best friend, the only friend I had in all the world!” And in a burst of emotion honest enough, and yet more uncontrolled than the emotions of most persons of that place and time, Gillian sobbed and cried, and hid her face upon the cushion of the great chair beside which she had sunk, until the dame, laying a hand upon the round shoulder whence the cape had slipped, said kindly yet reprovingly,—
“Nay, Gillian, ’tis not meet to give way to even the worthiest grief in such fashion as this. Dry up your eyes now, while I go to fetch you some orange-flower water, and when you have drunk it we will speak of other matters.”
“Nay, dear lady, I want no orange-flower water, nor to keep you longer than need be, but I have come to you a beggar, and would fain make my petition ere my courage fails.”