In the mean time, the young widow, Mercy Philbrick, and her old and almost childish mother, Mercy Carr, were coming by slow and tiring stage journeys up the dreary length of Cape Cod.

For thirty years the elder woman had never gone out of sight of the village graveyard in which her husband and four children were buried.

To transplant her was like transplanting an old weather-beaten tree, already dead at the top.

Yet the physicians had said that the only chance of prolonging her life was to take her away from the fierce winds of the sea.

She herself, while she loved them, shrank from them.