Early one morning Constance hurried out of the community house, tears running down her cheeks, to meet Captain Myles coming toward it.
"Why, pretty Constance, don't grieve, child!" said the Plymouth captain, heartily.
"Giles hath come to no harm, I warrant you, though he has spent the night again with that harum-scarum Jack Billington, and this time Francis Billington, too."
"Oh, Captain Standish, it is not Giles! I forgot Giles," gasped Constance.
Constance bent her head. "She is passing. I came to seek you," she said, and together she and the captain went to Rose's side.
They found Doctor Fuller there holding Rose's hand as she lay with closed eyes, breathing lightly. In his other hand he held his watch measuring the brief moments left, in which Rose Standish should be a part of time. Mary Brewster, the elder's wife, held up a warning finger not to disturb Rose, but Doctor Fuller looked quietly toward Captain Standish.
"It matters not now, Myles," he said. "You cannot harm her. There are but few moments left."
Myles Standish sprang forward, fell upon his knees, and raised Rose in his arms.
"Rose of the world, my English blossom, what have I done to bring thee here?" he sobbed, with a strong man's utter abandonment of grief, and with none of the Puritan habit of self-restraint.
"Wherever thou hadst gone, I would have chosen, my husband! I loved thee, Myles, I loved thee Myles!" she said, so clearly that everyone heard her sweet voice echo to the farthest corner of the room, and for the last time.
For with that supreme effort to comfort her husband, disarming his regret, Rose Standish died.
They bore Rose's body, so light that it was scarce a burden to the two men who carried it as in a litter, forth to the spot upon the hillside whither they had already made so many similar processions, which was fast becoming as thickly populated as was that portion of the colony occupied by the living.
But as the sun mounted higher, although the March winds cut on some days, then as now they do in March, yet, then as now, there were soft and dreamy days under the ascending sun's rays, made more effective by the moderating sea and flat sands.
The devastating diseases of winter began to abate; the pale, weak remnants of the _Mayflower's_ passengers crept out to walk with a sort of wonder upon the earth which was new to them, and which they had so nearly quitted that nothing, even of those aspects of things that most recalled the home land, seemed to them familiar.