She pinned a lace neckerchief over her breast, and laid its ruffles into place with fluttering fingers, catching it with a delicate hoop of pearls that had been her mother's. For once she decided against her Puritan cap, binding her radiant hair with fillets of narrow blue velvet ribbon, around and over which its little tendrils rose, wilful and resisting its shackles.
On her hands she drew long mitts of white lace, and she slipped her feet into white shoes, which had also once been worn by her mother in far-away days when she danced the May dances in Warwickshire.
Constance's glass was too small, too high-hung, to give her the effect of her complete figure, but it showed her the face that scanned it, and what it showed her flushed that lovely face with innocent joy in its loveliness, and completed its perfection.
She got the full effect of her appearance in the eyes of the four men in the colony whom, till this day, she had loved best, her father, Giles, Doctor Fuller, and Myles Standish, as she came down the winding stairway to them.
They all uttered an involuntary exclamation, and took a step toward her.
Her father took her hand and tucked it into his own.
"You are attired like a bride, my wild rose," he said. "Who are you going to meet?"
"Who knows!" cried Constance, gaily, with unconscious prophecy. "Mistress Fuller, but who can say whom else beside?"
The Anne came up with wide-spread canvas, free of the gentle easterly breeze. Her coming marked the end of the hardest days of Plymouth colony; she was bringing it much that it needed, some sixty colonists; the wives and children of many who had borne the brunt of the beginning and had come on the Mayflower; new colonists, some among Plymouth's best, some too bad to be allowed to stay, and stores and articles of trade abundantly.
As the coming of the Anne marked the close of Plymouth's worst days, so it meant to many who were already there the dawn of a new existence.