CHAPTER VII.
IN WIDOW'S WEEDS.
Go; you may call it madness, folly; You may not chase my gloom away.
There's such a charm in melancholy, I would not, if I could, be gay.
-- ROGERS.
Dorothe Stevens was not a woman to take misfortune much to heart.

She watched the ship in which her husband sailed until it vanished from sight, shed a few tears, heaved a few sighs and went home to see if the negro slave had prepared breakfast.

She smiled next day, and before the week was past she was quite gay.

She said she was not going to repine and languish in sorrow.
Her conduct shocked the staid Puritans, and her fine apparel was ungodly in their eyes.
Weeks rolled on, and no news came from the good ship _Silverwing_; but they might not hear from her for months, and Mrs.Stevens did not borrow trouble.

She did not dream that the ship could possibly be lost, or that her husband's voyage could be other than prosperous, so she plunged into a course of extravagance and pleasure that would have ruined a wealthier man than poor John Stevens.
"I must do something," she declared, "to relieve my mind from thoughts of my poor, dear, absent husband, for whom I grieve continually." Once John's mother and sister came to see her; but she was entertaining some ladies from Greensprings and wholly neglected her visitors.