Constance had other troubles to bear as well as the hardships and sorrows common to the sorely beset community. She seemed, to herself, hardly to be a young girl, so heavily weighted was she with the burden that she carried. She wondered to remember that if she had stayed in England she should have been laughing and singing like other girls of her age, skating now on the Sherbourne, if it were frozen over, as it well might be. Perhaps she might be dancing, if she were visiting her cousins in Warwickshire, her own birthplace, for the cousins were merry girls, and like all of Constance's mother's family, quite free from puritanical ideas, brought up in the English Church, so not debarred from the dance.
Constance had no heart to regret her loss of youthful happiness; she was so far aloof from it, so sad, that she could not rise to the level of feeling its charm. Dame Eliza Hopkins had carried out her threat, had accused Giles of the theft of his father's papers, and Constance of being party to his wrong-doing, if not actually its instigator.
It had only happened that morning; Constance heavily awaited developments. She jumped guiltily when she heard her father's voice speaking her name, and felt his hand upon her shoulder.
She faced him, white and shaken, to meet his troubled eyes intently fastened upon her.
"The storm is bad, Constance, but it is not warm within. Put on your coat and come with me. I must speak with you," he said.
In silence Constance obeyed him. Pulling over her head a hood that, like a deep cowl, was attached to her coat, she followed her father into the storm, and walked beside him toward the marshy shore whither, without speaking to her, he strode.
Arrived at the sedgy ocean line he halted, and turned upon her.
"Constance," he began, sternly, "my wife tells me that valuable papers which I entrusted to her keeping have disappeared. She tells me further that she had dropped them--carelessly, as I have told her--into the hammock in which your little sister slept and that you saw them there, commenting upon it; that you soon called Giles to set right some slight matter in the hammock; and that shortly after you and he had left her, she discovered her loss. What do you know of this? Tell me all that you know, and tell me the truth."