"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,"
Constance carolled as she hung up her cloak, her heart leaping in rapture of gratitude. Nor did Dame Eliza reprove her carol, but half smiled as Oceanus crowed and beat a pan wildly with his Christmas horse.
As the winter wore away, that second winter in Plymouth colony that proved so hard to endure, the new state of things in the Hopkins household continued. Constance could not understand her stepmother. Though the long habit of a lifetime could not be at once entirely abandoned, yet Dame Eliza scolded far less, and toward Constance herself maintained an attitude that was far from fault-finding. Indeed she managed to combine something like regretful deference that was not unlike liking, with a rigid keeping of her distance from the girl. Constance wondered what had come over Mistress Hopkins, but she was too thankful for the peace she enjoyed to disturb it by the least attempt to bridge the distance that Dame Eliza had established between them.