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“Susan, don’t let me hear ’ee talk like that—the man’s dead to you if he bain’t killed, an’ his name mustn’t ever be on your lips. I’m doin’ the best I can for ’ee, an’ I can’t think the Lard ’ud be angry with me for makin’ out a story what does no harm to nobody. As for that fellow, he be in the hands o’ the Lard—the Lard ’ull see to en. I leave en to the A’mighty.”

Mrs. Frizzell spoke with a certain almost terrible significance which made poor Susie’s blood run cold.

The stronger will gained the day, and a short time afterwards the Widow Griggs, clad in her “deep,” and sobbing in a heartrending fashion that had no pretence at all about it under her long veil, was led out of the house by her resolute little mother.

Mrs. Frizzell was by nature truthful, but in this emergency it must be owned that her veracity was exposed to tests from which it did not always escape unscathed.

When one of her neighbours asked her if she did not mean to apply for relief on her daughter’s behalf from some of the funds instituted for soldiers’ widows, she could reply boldly enough that such an appeal would be useless, as Private Griggs had married without leave, and Susan’s claim would therefore not be recognised. But when the sympathetic, but exasperatingly pertinacious Mrs. Cross—the gossip who had been chosen in the first instance to spread the news of Susan’s bereavement—plied her with questions anent her departed son-in-law, the poor woman occasionally found herself so completely cornered as to be obliged to invent appropriate answers.