and the gallant ship and all the gallant souls therein; and loving eyes in Bideford and Appledore, Clovelly and Ilfracombe, have grown hollow with watching and with weeping for those who have sailed away into the West, as John Oxenham sailed before them, and have vanished like a dream, as he did, into the infinite unknown.  Three weary years, and yet no word.  Once there was a flush of hope, and good Sir Richard (without Mrs. Leigh’s knowledge), had sent a horseman posting across to Plymouth, when the news arrived that Drake, Frobisher, and Carlisle had returned with their squadron from the Spanish Main.  Alas! he brought back great news, glorious news; news of the sacking of Cartagena, San Domingo, Saint Augustine; of the relief of Raleigh’s Virginian Colony:  but no news of the Rose, and of those who had sailed in her.  And Mrs. Leigh bowed her head, and worshipped, and said, “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord!”

Her hair was now grown gray; her cheeks were wan; her step was feeble.  She seldom went from home, save to the church, and to the neighboring cottages.  She never mentioned her sons’ names; never allowed a word to pass her lips, which might betoken that she thought of them; but every day, when the tide was high, and red flag on the sandhills showed that there was water over the bar, she paced the terrace-walk, and devoured with greedy eyes the sea beyond in search of the sail which never came.  The stately ships went in and out as of yore; and white sails hung off the bar for many an hour, day after day, month after month, year after year:  but an instinct within told her that none of them were the sails she sought.  She knew that ship, every line of her, the cut of every cloth; she could have picked it out miles away, among a whole fleet, but it never came, and Mrs. Leigh bowed her head and worshipped, and went to and fro among the poor, who looked on her as an awful being, and one whom God had brought very near to Himself, in that mysterious heaven of sorrow which they too knew full well.  And lone women and bed-ridden men looked in her steadfast eyes, and loved them, and drank in strength from them; for they knew (though she never spoke of her own grief) that she had gone down into the fiercest depths of the fiery furnace, and was walking there unhurt by the side of One whose form was as of the Son of God.  And all the while she was blaming herself for her “earthly” longings, and confessing nightly to Heaven that weakness which she could not shake off, which drew her feet at each high tide to the terrace-walk beneath the row of wind-clipt trees.