“Yes, —­ if you will only let me stay out here a little while.”

He put a chair for her instantly, and himself remained standing near, as he had done before.

“Walk on, if you wish,” said Elizabeth.  “Don’t mind me.”

But instead of that he drew up another chair, and sat down.

There was silence then that might be felt.  The moonlight poured down noiselessly on the water, and over the low dusky distant shore; the ripples murmured under the sloop’s prow; the wind breathed gently through the sails.  Now and then the creak of the rudder sounded, but the very stars were not more calmly peaceful than everything else.

“There is quiet and soothing in the speech of such a scene as this,” Winthrop said after a time.

“Quiet!” said Elizabeth.  Her voice choked, and it was a little while before she could go on. —­ “Nothing is quiet to a mind in utter confusion.”

“Is yours so?”

“Yes.”

The sobs were at her very lips, but the word got out first.

“It is no wonder,” he observed gently.

“Yes it is wonder,” said Elizabeth; —­ “or at least it is what needn’t be.  Yours wouldn’t be so in any circumstances.”

“What makes the confusion?” —­ he asked, in a gentle considerate tone that did not press for an answer.

“The want of a single fixed thing that my thoughts can cling to.”

He was silent a good while after that.

“There is nothing fixed in this world,” he said at length.

“Yes there is,” said Elizabeth bitterly.  “There are friends —­ and there is a self-reliant spirit —­ and there is a settled mind.”

“Settled —­ about what?”

“What it will and what it ought to do.”

“Is yours not settled on the latter point?” he asked.

“If it were,” said Elizabeth with a little hesitation and struggling, —­ “that don’t make it settled.”

“It shews where the settling point is.”

“Which leaves it as far as ever from being settled,” said Elizabeth, almost impatiently.

“A self-reliant spirit, if it be not poised on another foundation than its own, hath no fixedness that is worth anything, Miss Elizabeth; —­ and friends are not safe things to trust to.”

“Some of them are,” said Elizabeth.

“No, for they are not sure.  There is but one friend that cannot be taken away from us.”

“But to know that, and to know everything else about him, does not make him our friend,” said Elizabeth in a voice that trembled.

“To agree to everything about him, does.”

“To agree? —­ How? —­ I do agree to it,” said Elizabeth.

“Do you?  Are you willing to have him for a King to reign over you? —­ as well as a Saviour to make you and keep you safe?”

She did not answer.

“You do not know everything about him, neither.”

“What don’t I know?”