Stevens remembered to have seen a very pretty girl on the streets
of Jamestown, and for having praised her beauty, his wife had grown
insanely jealous and given way to one of her outbursts of anger. The
gentleman from London was Mr. Samuel Holmes, who had been a too warm
friend of Charles I. to suit the Protectorate, and after Cromwellism had
become a certainty, he considered it better to fly the country. As
Virginia had been friendly to cavaliers, he had brought his daughter to
Jamestown and spent six months there; but, being assured by friends that
he could return with safety, he had decided to go home.

From that time John Stevens and Mr. Holmes became friends. In a day or
two more the passengers had nearly all recovered from their
seasickness, and the voyage promised to be a favorable one. John
Stevens met Blanche Holmes, a pretty blue-eyed English girl, with light
brown hair and ruddy cheeks. She was not over eighteen years of age, and
was one of those trusting, confiding creatures, who win friends at
first sight. By the strange, fortuitous circumstances which fate seems
to indiscriminately weave about people, the maid and John Stevens were
thrown much into each other's society.

She had many questions to ask about the New World. He, having passed all
his life there and having explored the coast to Massachusetts and fought
many battles with the Indians, was able to entertain her, and she never
seemed to tire of listening to his adventures. It never occurred to John
that there could be any impropriety in talking to this child, nor was
there any, though modern society might condemn him. He never mentioned
his family to either Blanche or her father.

That wife and children left at Jamestown were subjects too sacred for
general conversation. When alone in his stateroom he knelt and breathed
a prayer for them, and often in his dreams he heard his laughing boy at
play, or felt the warm, soft hand of his baby on his cheek, or heard her
sweet voice calling him. Often he awoke and sobbed like a child on
discovering that the ship was hourly bearing him further and further
from home.

Mr. Holmes was a cheerful companion at first, but gradually he grew
melancholy, and at times inapproachable. One day John met him at the
gangway, and he took the young man's arm and, leading him aft, said:

"I want to talk with you."

They sat upon some coils of rope, and Mr. Holmes resumed: "We are going
to have bad weather. I am somethi