And the "little cloud, no bigger than a man's hand," was rising on the horizon.
Before bedtime the sky was overcast, and the blessed, the prayed-for rain began to fall. Without wind or lightning, quietly it fell, as if the angels of God were sent to open the phials of the delicious wetness and pour it steadily upon Plymouth. As the night went on the rain increased, one of the soft, steady, soaking rains that penetrate to the depths of the sun-baked earth, find the withered rootlets, and heal and revivify.
Plymouth wakened to an earth refreshed and moistened by a downpour so steady, so generous, so calm that no rain could have seemed more like a direct visitation of Heaven's mercy than this, which the reverent and awe-stricken colony, even to the doubting Indians, so received. For by it Plymouth was saved.
It was two weeks later that Doctor Fuller came hastily to Stephen Hopkins's door.
"Friends," he said, with trembling voice, "the _Anne_ is coming up! Mistress Fuller and my child are aboard, as we have so often reminded one another. Constance, you promised to go with me to welcome this fateful ship."
"Have I time to make a little, a very small toilette, doctor mine?" cried Constance, excitedly. "I want to look my prettiest to greet Mistress Fuller, and to tell her what I--what we all owe to you."
"You have a full half hour, yet it is a pleasure to watch the ship approach. Hasten, then, vain little Eve of this desolate First Abiding Place!" the doctor gave her permission.
Constance ran away and began to dress with her heart beating fast.
"I wonder why the _Anne_ means so much to me, as if she were the greatest event of all my days here?" she thought.
Her simple white gown slipped over her head and into place and out of its thin, soft folds her little throat rose like a calla, and her face, all flushed, like a wild rose.
She pinned a lace neckerchief over her breast, and laid its ruffles into place with fluttering fingers, catching it with a delicate hoop of pearls that had been her mother's. For once she decided against her Puritan cap, binding her radiant hair with fillets of narrow blue velvet ribbon, around and over which its little tendrils rose, wilful and resisting its shackles.