Seven long years had passed since James sailed.  Years of watching, of waiting, of cheerful patience, at first, and at last of resigned sorrow.  Once they heard from James, at the first port where the ship stopped.  It was a letter dear to his mother’s heart, manly, resigned and Christian; expressing full purpose to work with God in whatever calling he should labor, and cheerful hopes of the future.  Then came a long, long silence, and then tidings that the Eastern Star had been wrecked on a reef in the Indian ocean!  The mother had given back her treasure into the same beloved hands whence she first received him.  “I gave him to God, and God took him,” she said.  “I shall have him again in God’s time.”  This was how she settled the whole matter with herself.  Diana had mourned with all the vehement intensity of her being, but out of the deep baptism of sorrow she had emerged with a new and nobler nature.  The vain, trifling, laughing Undine had received a soul and was a true woman.  She devoted herself to James’s mother with an utter self-sacrificing devotion, resolved as far as in her lay to be both son and daughter to her.  She read, and studied, and fitted herself as a teacher in a neighboring academy, and persisted in claiming the right of a daughter to place all the amount of her earnings in the family purse.

And this year there was special need.  With all his care, with all his hard work and that of his family, Deacon Silas never had been able to raise money to annihilate the debt upon the farm.

There seemed to be a perfect fatality about it.  Let them all make what exertions they might, just as they were hoping for a sum that should exceed the interest and begin the work of settling the principal would come some loss that would throw them all back.  One year their barn was burned just as they had housed their hay.  On another a valuable horse died, and then there were fits of sickness among the children, and poor crops in the field, and low prices in the market; in short, as Biah remarked, “The deacon’s luck did seem to be a sort o’ streaky, for do what you might there’s always suthin’ to put him back.”  As the younger boys grew up the deacon had ceased to hire help, and Biah had transferred his services to Squire Jones, a rich landholder in the neighborhood, who wanted some one to overlook his place.  The increased wages had enabled him to give a home to Maria Jane and a start in life to two or three sturdy little American citizens who played around his house door.  Nevertheless, Biah never lost sight of the “deacon’s folks” in his multifarious cares, and never missed an opportunity either of doing them a good turn or of picking up any stray item of domestic news as to how matters were going on in that interior.  He had privately broached the theory to Miss Briskett, “that arter all it was James that Diany (he always pronounced all names as if they ended in y) was sot on, and that she took it so hard, his goin’ off, that it did beat all!  Seemed to make another gal of her; he shouldn’t wonder if she’d come out and jine the church.”  And Diana not long after unconsciously fulfilled Biah’s predictions.