"Nay, then, John, I've had my fill of partings," she said. "Are they gone back, those we had to leave behind?"
"That have they!" cried John Billington. "Some of them were sorry to miss the adventure, but if truth were told some were glad to be well out of it, and with no more disgrace in setting back than that the Mayflower could not hold us all. Well, they've missed danger and maybe death, but I'd not be out of it for a king's ransom. Giles, what do you think is whispered? That the Speedwell could make the voyage as well as the Mayflower, though she be smaller, if only she carried less sail, and that her leaking is—a greater leak in her master Reynolds's truth, and that she'd be seaworthy if he'd let her!"
"Cur!" growled Giles Hopkins. "He knows he'd have to stay with his ship in the wilderness a year it might be and there's better comfort in England and Holland! We're well rid of him if he's that kind of a coward. I wondered myself if he was up to a trick when we put in the first time, at Dartmouth. This time when we made Plymouth I smelled a rat certain. Are we almost loaded?"
"Yes. They've packed all the provisions from the Speedwell into the Mayflower that she will hold. We'll be off soon. Not too soon! The sixth day of September, and we a month dallying along the shore because of the Speedwell's leaking! Constantia, you'll be cold before we make a fire in the New World I'm thinking!"
John Billington chuckled as if the cold of winter in the wilderness were a merry jest.
"Cold, and maybe hungry, and maybe ill of body and sick of heart, but never quite losing courage, I hope, John, comrade!" Constance said, looking up with a smile and a flush that warmed her white cheeks from which heavy thoughts had driven their usual soft colour.
"No fear! You're the kind that says little and does much," said John Billington with surprising sharpness in a lad that never seemed to have a thought to spare for anything but madcap pranks.
"Here come Father, and the captain, and dear John," said little Damaris.
Stephen Hopkins was a strong-built man, with a fire in his eye, and an air of the world about him, in spite of his severe Puritan garb, that declared him different from most of his comrades of the Leyden community of English exiles.
With all her likeness to her dead English girl-mother, who was gentle born and well bred, there was something in Constance as she stood now, head up and eyes bright, that was also like her father.