Constance shared to the uttermost her father's apprehension. If her poor, hasty father had again accused Giles of that which he had not done, and this when he was aglow with a renewal of the old confidence between them, then it well might be that Giles, equally hot-headed, had done some desperate thing in his first sore rage. The fact that he had been absent from the wedding of John Alden, whom he cared for deeply; that he had missed his supper and breakfast; and that John Billington, reckless, adventurous Jack, was missing at the same time, left Constance little ground for hope that nothing was wrong.
But nothing of this did she allow to escape in her manner of speech.
She gaily told her father all about her morning: how cleverly she had lengthened Priscilla's gown, her own mother's gown, lent Pris; how becomingly she had arranged Pris's pretty hair; all the small feminine details which a man, especially a brave, manly man of Stephen Hopkins's kind, is supposed to scorn, but which Constance was instinctively sympathetic enough to know rested and amused her father; soothed him with its pretty femininity; relaxed him as proving that in a world of such pretty trifles tragedy could not exist.
"My stepmother is not come back yet," Constance said, with a swift glance around, as she entered. "Father, when she comes in with the baby you must test his newly discovered powers; Oceanus is beginning to stand alone! Now I must go doff my Sunday best—Father, I never can learn to call it the Sabbath; please forgive me!—and put on my busy-maid clothes! What a brief time a marriage takes! I mean in the making!" She laughed and ran lightly away, up the steep stairs that wound in threatening semi-spiral, up under the steep lean-to roof.
"Bless my sunshine!" said Stephen Hopkins, fervently, as he watched her skirt whisk around the door at the stairway foot.
But upstairs, in the small room that she and Damaris shared, his "sunshine" was blurred by a swift rain of tears.
[CHAPTER XII]
The Lost Lads
A gray evening of mist drifting in from the sea settled down upon Plymouth. It emphasized the silence and seemed to widen and deepen the vacuum created by the absence of Giles and John. For the supper hour, at which they were enthusiastically prompt to return to give their hearty appetites their due, came and passed without bringing back the boys.
Stephen Hopkins pushed away his plate with its generous burden untouched, threw on his wide-brimmed hat, and strode out of the house without a word. Constance knew that he had gone to ask help from Myles Standish, to organize a search, and go out to find the lost.