“Where are we going?” said Elizabeth presently.  “We’re getting out of the channel.”

But she saw immediately that Winthrop was asleep.  It made her feel more utterly alone and forlorn than she had done before.  With a sort of additional chill at her heart, she looked round for some one else of whom to ask her question, and saw the skipper just come on deck.  Elizabeth got up to speak to him.

“Aren’t we getting out of our course?”

“Eg-zackly,” said Mr. Hildebrand.  “Most out of it.  That light’s the Mill, marm.”

“The Mill!  Cowslip’s Mill?”

“Well, it’s called along o’ my father, ’cause he’s lived there, I s’pose, —­ and made it, —­ and owns to it, too, as far as that goes; —­ I s’pose it’s as good a right to have his name as any one’s.”

Elizabeth sat down and looked at the light, which now had a particularly cheerless and hopeless look for her.  It was the token of somebody’s home, shining upon one who had none; it was a signal of the near ending of a guardianship and society which for the moment had taken home’s place; a reminder that presently she must be thrown upon her own guidance; left to take care of herself alone in the world, as best she might.  The journey, with all its pain, had been a sort of little set-off from the rest of her life, where the contrasts of the past and the future did not meet.  They were coming back now.  She felt their shadows lying cold upon her.  It was one of the times in her life of greatest desolation, the while the sloop was drawing down to her berth under the home light, and making fast in her moorings.  The moon was riding high, and dimly shewed Elizabeth the but half-remembered points and outlines; —­ and there was a contrast!  She did not cry; she looked, with a cold chilled feeling of eye and mind that would have been almost despair, if it had not been for the one friend asleep at her side.  And he was nothing to her.  Nothing.  He was nothing to her.  Elizabeth said it to herself; but for all that he was there, and it was a comfort to see him there.

The sails rattled down to the deck; and with wind and headway the sloop gently swung up to her appointed place.  Another light came out of the house, in a lantern; and another hand on shore aided the sloop’s crew in making her fast.

“How can he sleep through it all!” thought Elizabeth.  “I wonder if anything ever could shake him out of his settled composure —­ asleep or awake, it’s all the same.”

“Ain’t you goin’ ashore?” said the skipper at her side.

“No —­ not now.”

“They’ll slick up a better place for you than we could fix up in this here little hulk.  Though she ain’t a small sloop neither, by no means.”

“What have you got aboard there, Hild’?” called out a voice that came from somewhere in the neighbourhood of the lantern.  “Gals?”

“Governor Landholm and some company,” said the skipper in a more moderate tone.  The other voice took no hint of moderation.