Mrs. Thornton was a feeling, but an essentially Christian woman. The death of John was a blow to her from which she would never recover, as indeed the death of all of them had once been. But she taught the children in saying their prayers to thank God for John’s noble end and let it always be an example to them: and then she taught them to ask God to forgive the pirates for all their cruelty to them. She explained to them that God could only do this when they had been properly punished on earth. The only one who could not understand this at all was Laura⁠—she was, after all, rather young. She used the same form of words as the others, yet contrived to imagine that she was praying to the pirates, not for them; so that it gradually came about that whenever God was mentioned in her hearing the face she imagined for Him was Captain Jonsen’s.

Once more a phase of their lives was receding into the past, and crystallising into myth.