Page:Salem - a tale of the seventeenth century (IA taleseventeenth00derbrich).pdf/326

 knew that she had not only no other child than his wife, but no other near relative, there arose in his mind the vague hope that Alice might have left a living child; and the description of the little girl's age and appearance confirmed this new hope. Yet, if so, why had the fact never been communicated to him? And his sole object and interest now in life was to find her. But Elsie Campbell had taken her measures too carefully, and concealed her trail too successfully for this.

For years he had prosecuted this eager but ever unsuccessful search, which had for him the only hope which life still held for him.

At last, baffled and worn out by repeated disappointments, he accepted the invitation of his friend Sir William Phips to try to forget his trouble in the excitement of visiting the New World, to which Sir William, in his new appointment of governor, was about to embark. In very hopelessness he consented to make the trial; and here, where he least expected it, and under circumstances stranger than fiction could invent, in the