t. You are too young to
hear about that," Chilian said decisively, with a glance at Bentley.

CHAPTER VIII

SORROW'S CROWN OF SORROW

Occasionally they went down to the warehouse, and while Chilian was busy
some of the captains or mates would speak to her. They knew about her
father and one sad fact she did not know. For she had settled in her
mind that Captain Corwin would bring him back and that it would take a
long, long while. So she tried to be content and if not teasing or
fretting was one of the ways of being good, she tried her utmost to keep
to that. She was too brave to tell falsehoods to shield herself from any
inadvertent wrongdoing, even if Cousin Elizabeth did sometimes say:

"You ought to be soundly whipped. To spare the rod is to spoil the
child."

She thought if anybody ever did whip her she should hate him all the
rest of her life. Servants and workmen were beaten in India, and it
seemed degrading. She did not know that Cousin Chilian had insisted that
she should never be struck. He was understanding more every day how her
father had loved her, and finding sweet traits in her unfolding.

She liked these rough bronzed men to touch their odd hats to her and
call her Missy. Some of them had seen her in Calcutta and knew her
father. And when she said, "It takes a long, long while to go there and
come back, but when Captain Corwin brings him he is going to live here
and will never go to sea any more"--"No, that he never will, missy;" and
the sailor drew his hand across his eyes.

Oh, how full the wharves were with shipping! Flags and pennons waved,
and white sails; others, gray with age and weather, flapped in the wind.
She liked to see them start out; she always sent a message by them in
the full faith of childhood. And there were the fishermen in the cove
lower down. Fishing was quite a great business.

Cousin Giles had made his visit and spent two whole days down in the
warehouse, when they had not taken her. But she helped Cousin Eunice cut
the stems of the sweet garden herbs for drying, and the others for
perfumery. There was lavender, the blossoms had been gathered long ago,
and sweet marjoram and sweet clover. She always gathered the full-blown
rose leaves and sewed them up in little bags and laid them among the
household stores. Everything was so fragrant. Cynthia thought she liked
it better than sandalwood and the pungent Oriental perfumes.

Then came the autumnal storms, when the