“If you need me, Myles, I’m with you, whatever else betide.”
And the two men grasped hands and looked into each other’s eyes. Then with a voice more moved than any had heard from him in three days Standish said, “I thought I could count upon your kindness, Will, if you knew my need. Let all the rest go, and when darkness has fallen, we two will come back to my little maid’s grave, and I’ll tell you there.”
And so it was. The funeral feast, almost a necessity where so many came from far, was served and eaten nearly in silence, and then the guests departed, Dame Bradford under charge of her two sons, and tenderly served by Gillian, whose volatile spirit was quenched in the abundant tears that meant so little from her eyes.
Night had fallen, and the waning moon was shining mournfully over the waters, when at a signal from his host Bradford followed him into the open air and, with a word or two, along the path the funeral procession had just trodden.
The young birch was in leaf, and a little west wind rustled and sighed among its branches, casting flickering shadows across the new-turfed mound, lined from west to east that the sleeper, obedient to the great call, might in upstanding face the rising of the Sun of Righteousness.
“Sit you down, Bradford. There’s a rock she’s often rested on. Don’t speak until I gather my thoughts and know what ’tis I mean to say.”
Without reply Bradford, drawing his cloak around him, for the spring night was chill, sat down upon the boulder, where indeed Lora had dreamed away many an hour, gazing across the sea that ever drew her with its vague, sad calling, and waited silently while Standish, with folded arms and head bent upon his breast, paced up and down, up and down, now standing upon the crumbling edge of the cliff near at hand, now pacing back to the little church a bow-shot from the shore.
At last, with sudden and hurried footsteps, as though fearing to linger over his decision, the soldier drew near, holding a folded paper in his hand, and exclaimed,—
“Bradford! You too have an only daughter. If a man insulted her bitterly, bitterly, what would you do to him?”
“Insulted her? How?”