"For look you," he said, summing up comments upon it to his sister. "I don't mind encountering defeat by clever outwitting of me. We tried a scheme and the governor had a better one. What I mind is unfairness; that was fair, and I like the governor better than I ever did before."
Stephen Hopkins stood in the doorway of the house as the brother and sister came toward it. He was gazing at the skyline with eyes that saw nothing near to him, preoccupied, wistful, in a mood that was rare to him, and never betrayed to others. His eyes came back to earth slowly, and he looked at Giles and Constance as one looks who has difficulty in seeing realities, so occupied was he with his thoughts. He put out a hand and took one of Constance's hands, drawing it up close to his breast, and he laid his left hand heavily on Giles's shoulder.
"Across that ocean it is Christmas day," he said, slowly. "In England people are sitting around their hearths mulling ale, roasting apples, singing old songs and carols. When I was young your mother and I rode miles across a dim forest, she on her pillion, I guiding a mettlesome beauty. But she had no fear with my hand on his bridle; we had been married but since Michaelmas. We went to visit your grandmother, her mother, Lady Constantia, who was a famous toast in her youth. You are very like your mother, Constance; I have often told you this. Strange, that one can inhabit the same body in such different places in a lifetime; stranger that, still in the same body, he can be such an altered man! Giles, my son, I have been thinking long thoughts to-day. There is something that I must say to you as your due; nay something, rather, that I want to say to you. I have been wrong, my son. I have loved you so well that a defect in you annoyed me, and I have been hard, impatient, offending against the charity in judgment that we owe all men, surely most those who are our nearest and dearest. I accused you unjustly, and gave you no opportunity to explain. Giles, as man to man, and as a father who failed you, I beg your pardon."
"Oh, sir! Oh, dear, dear Father!" cried Giles in distress. "It needed not this! All I ask is your confidence. I have been an arrogant young upstart, denying you your right to deal with me. It is I who am wrong, wrongest in that I have never confessed the wrong, and asked your forgiveness. Surely it is for me to beg your pardon; not you mine!"
"At least a good example is your due from me," said Stephen Hopkins, with a smile of wistful tenderness. "We are all upstarts, Giles lad, denying that we should receive correction, and this from a Greater than I. The least that we can do is to be willing to acknowledge our errors. With all my heart I forgive you, lad, and I ask you to try to love me, and let there be the perfect loving comradeship between us that, it hath seemed, we had left behind us on the other shore, just when it was most needed to sustain us in our venture on this one. You loved me well, Giles, as a child; love me as well as you can as a man."
Giles caught his father's hand in both of his, and was not ashamed that tears were streaming down his cheeks.
"Father, I never loved you till to-day!" he cried. "You have taught me true greatness, and—and—Oh, indeed I love and honour you, dear sir!"
"The day of good will, and of peace to it! And of love that triumphs over wrongs," said Stephen Hopkins, turning toward the house, and whimsically touching with his finger-tips the happy tears that quivered on Constance's lashes.
"We cannot keep it out of Plymouth colony, however we strive to erect barriers against the feast; Christmas wins, though outlawed!"
"God rest ye merry, gentlemen;
Let nothing you dismay,"