Intent on holding the flower carefully, she came suddenly in front of a man who had been walking in lonely fashion up and down the shore. She heard him call her name eagerly.
Looking up, Love almost dropped the tulip in her joy. Then she set it down and rushed into his arms.
“Father, dear father! Oh, where have you been so long?” she cried.
It was a story told between laughter and tears. Goodman Bradford, only a short time since released from prison, had come straight to Amsterdam, but he had been able to find no trace of Love. Mistress Brewster had gone on with the Pilgrims to America, and there was no one to tell Goodman Bradford where his little daughter was. Now, he could make a home for her and reward Jan’s mother.
“I was patient,” Love said, “as you bade me be, and see,” she cried as, hand in hand, they reached the quaint little cottage where Jan and his mother stood at the door to greet them, “in good time they both came to me—the pink tulip, and my father.”
“See to it, Preserve, that you win a colored ribbon from the schoolmaster to-day,” Mistress Edwards said as she turned from her task of polishing the pewter platter to look at the boy who stood in the doorway of the log cabin.
[Illustration: “THE LOG CABIN WAS BUT A ROUGH HOME”]
“This is the day, I hear, on which the good-conduct ribbons are given out for the month, brightly dyed ones for the boys and girls whose lessons have been well learned, and black for the dunces. There is no chance of your coming home to me to-night without a ribbon of merit, is there?” The Colonial mother crossed the room and put her hands on her lad’s shoulder, looking anxiously into his honest brown eyes.
“No, mother,” Preserve answered. “At least I have hopes of winning a ribbon. Not once this month have I failed in my sums, and I can read my chapters in the Bible as well as any child in school.”
“That is good!” Mistress Edwards said, pulling the boy’s long, dark cloak more closely about him and smoothing the cloth of his tall hat.
Preserve Edwards was a Puritan lad of many years ago. The log cabin that he was leaving to walk two miles through the clearing and across the woods to school was but a rough home. A few straight chairs and a hard settle, made of logs and standing by the fireplace, a deal table and the few pewter utensils, were almost the only furnishings of the living room. In one corner stood an old musket. Mistress Edwards looked toward it now in fear.