In the next few minutes he got the surprise of his life: Davidina did not tell it. She had, it is true, something of her own to tell which was a departure from fact; for she said the stream had carried her down a mile and over the weir, at which point she had got upon her feet and waded out; whereas having fallen from the bridge on the upstream side she had become entangled in its central timbers, and after keeping low for a while and watching her brother safely out of sight along the further bank, had climbed out again and gone back into the wood. And there, I regret to say, she had wilfully stayed--warming herself with sharp exercise the while--listening to Mr. Trimblerigg’s intermittent cries of distress, watching the flit of lanterns, hearing the harsh shouts of the search-party, and calculating coolly how long they would take to give up quest for the body that was not there. And her motive for all this? Her motive was to give Mr. Trimblerigg his chance: his chance to tell the truth, or to do otherwise, just as he chose. Now was this charitable of her? I do not know. I only know that she genuinely thought it would do him good: to give him the chance, just once, of his own accord, to tell something against himself, bad for his moral credit, bad for his future prospects, and bad for his self-esteem. And yet, though that may have been her motive, I doubt whether it was not practically overborne by her sharp appreciative foresight of the actual shaping of the event. After waiting for well over an hour to give her brother all the rope he needed to tie himself up in glory, she crossed the bridge, collected the parcels, his as well as hers, and went home. And so well had she timed herself that it was just as the second telling finished that she entered. It took the family some moments to get over their surprise; but Mrs. Trimblerigg, an eminently practical woman, did not let them wait for questions now. She ran them up to their rooms, got them out of their wet clothes, then brought them down again, bundled in hot blankets to sit opposite each other by the fire; and now to be heard once more, telling their tale more fully each in their own way.