Elder William Brewster kept her some time. She was nervously anxious to escape, fearing to miss the boys' arrival. But Elder Brewster was deeply interested in pretty Constance Hopkins, in whom, in spite of her sweet docility and patient daily performance of her hard tasks, he discerned glimpses of girlish liveliness that made him anxious and which he felt must be corrected to bring the dear girl into perfection.
Constance decided that she was expiating fully whatever fault there might have been in feigning an errand to Elder Brewster to get rid of the girls as she sat uneasily listening to that good man's exposition of the value of alleluias in the heart above those sung in church, and the baseness of allowing the mind to look back for a moment at the "shackles from which she was freed." Good Elder Brewster ended by reading from his roughened brown leather-covered Bible the story of Lot's wife to which Constance—who had heard it many times, it being an appropriate theme for the pilgrim band to ponder, sick in heart and body as they had been so long—did not harken.
At last she was dismissed with a fatherly hand laid on her shining head, and a last warning to keep in mind how favoured above her English cousins she had been to be chosen a daughter in Israel to help found a kingdom of righteousness. Constance ran like the wind down the road, stump-bordered, the beginning of a street, and came down upon the beach just as the boys reached it and their boat bumped up on the sand under the last three hard pulls they had given the oars in unison.
"Oh! Giles, oh, Giles, oh Jack!" cried Constance fairly dancing under her excitement.
"Oh, Con, oh, Con! Oh, Constantia!" mocked John, hauling away on the painter and getting the boat up to her tying stake.
"What happened you? Have you news?" Constance implored them.
"We heard no especial news, Con," said Giles. "I'm not sure we asked for any. We have this instead; will that suffice you?"
He took from his breast the packet of papers and offered it to her.
"Oh, Giles!" sighed Constance, clasping her hands, tears of relief springing to her eyes. "All of them? Are they all safe? Thank Heaven!" she added as Giles nodded.
"Did you have trouble getting them? Who held them? Tell me everything!"