brow, and felt very miserable, remembering that if she yielded, it would
be to Miles and not to him. She divined what was in his mind, and sent him
to Heaven with one of the womanliest and loveliest things that ever woman
said to man: "Why don't you speak for yourself, John?" she asked, gazing
straight at him, with a quiver of her lips that was half humor and half
the promise of tears.

John still had before him a bad quarter of an hour with the Captain; it
was as hard to make him understand that he had not played the traitor to
him as it had been to persuade Priscilla to do what she had not done; but
the affair ended without a tragedy, which would have spoiled it. Captain
Standish, when Priscilla married, went to live in Duxbury; and a year or
two later worked off his spleen by slaying the Indian rascals who were
plotting to murder the Weston settlers at Weymouth. He and his men did not
wait for the savages to strike the first blow; they made no pretense of
exhausting all the resources of diplomacy before proceeding to
extremities. They walked up to the enemy, suddenly seized them by the
throat, and drove the knives which the Indians themselves wore through
their false hearts. There was no more trouble from Indians in that region
for a long time; and Captain Standish's feelings were greatly relieved. As
for John and Priscilla, they lived long and prospered, John attaining the
age of eighty-seven, which indicates domestic felicity. They had issue,
and their descendants live among us to this day in comfort and honor.

King James, like other spiteful and weak men, had a long memory, and amid
the many things that engaged his attention he did not forget the colonists
of Plymouth, who had exiled themselves without a charter from him. In the
same year which witnessed their disembarkation at Plymouth Rock, he
incorporated a company consisting of friends of his own, and gave them a
tract of country between the fortieth and the forty-eighth parallels of