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. 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 satis_fy_ ’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.” When poor Susan’s baby boy arrived great astonishment was elicited by the fact that the soft down which covered its little head was of a distinctly ruddy colour. “Dear, to be sure,” remarked Mrs. Cross, “he can’t take after his father, poor, dear little hinfant. You said he was a black-haired man, didn’t you, Mrs. Frizzell? And Susan’s hair be just so yellow as the corn. I can’t call to mind as there be any red-haired folks in your family, or Frizzell’s either.”