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Thus, before very long, it became known in the village that the late Private Griggs had been a tall, dark man, very well-looking; that he came from somewhere up the country; that his mother was breaking her heart about his loss, but his father did seem to bear up very well. They didn’t write often to Susan—no, for the poor dear were that undone she couldn’t a-bear so much as to hear his name mentioned; in fact, Mrs. Frizzell herself did scarcely ever mention it to her. (“And that’s true!” remarked the originator of this history, with infinite satisfaction.) No more didn’t Frizzell—indeed, poor Frizzell were that upset about it that the less said to en the better.

Sometimes Mrs. Frizzell was a little startled when these figments were recalled to her—many of them, indeed, were so much embellished by transmission from mouth to mouth that she scarcely recognised her own original creation; but she deemed it best to let the story pass.

“Let ’em please theirselves,” she murmured. “I didn’t say so much as that, but ’tis better to let ’em think so if it do satisfy ’em. There,” she would add, when tormented by some particularly keen twinge of conscience, “’tis to be ’oped as the Lard will forgi’e me. I can’t believe as it ’ull be held agen me, seein’ as it’s for the sake of my own child.”