“You are a very impudent young lady,” growled the director.

“I may be a plain spoken one,” said Ruth, not at all alarmed by the man’s manner.  “I don’t know how you would have felt had Miss Gray been drowned.  I should think you would think of that!”

But the man seemed more disturbed about the delay to the picture that was being taken.

“I shall expect you to be ready bright and early in the morning, Miss Gray!” he shouted as the automobile moved off.  The young actress, half fainting in the tonneau between the Briarwood Hall girls, did not hear him.

It was several miles to the Red Mill, and Ruth, worried, said:  “I’m afraid Tom will catch cold, Helen.”

“And—­and this po—­poor girl, too,” stammered Tom’s sister, as the car jounced over a particularly rough piece of road.

Hazel Gray opened her eyes languidly, murmuring:  “I shall be all right, thank you!  Just drive to the hotel——­”

“What hotel?” asked Ruth, laughing.

“In Cheslow.  I don’t know the name of it,” whispered Hazel Gray.  “Is there more than one?”

“There is; but you’ll not go all the way to Cheslow in your condition,” declared Ruth.  “We’re taking you to the Red Mill.  Now! no objections, please.  Hurry up, Tommy.”

“But I am all wet,” protested the girl.

“I should say you were,” gasped Helen.

“Nobody knows better than I,” said Ruth, “that the water of the Lumano river is at least damp, at all seasons.”

“I will make you a lot of trouble,” objected Miss Gray.

“No, you won’t,” the girl of the Red Mill repeated.  “Aunt Alvirah will snuggle you down between soft, fluffy blankets, and give you hot boneset tea, or ‘composition,’ and otherwise coddle you.  To-morrow morning you will feel like a new girl.”

“Oh, dear!” groaned Miss Gray.  “I wish I were a new girl.”

A very few minutes later they came in sight of the Red Mill, with the rambling, old, story-and-a-half dwelling beside it, in which Jabez Potter’s grandfather had been born.  Although the leaves had long since fallen from the trees, and the lawn was brown, the sloping front yard of the Potter house was very attractive.  The walks were swept, the last dead leaf removed, and the big stones at the main gateway were dazzlingly white-washed.

The jar and rumble of the grist-mill, and the trickle of the water on the wheel, made a murmurous accompaniment to all the other sounds of life about the place.  From the rear of the old house fowls cackled, a mule sent his clarion call across the fields, and hungry pigs squealed their prayer for supper.  A cow lowed impatiently at the pasture bars in answer to the querulous blatting of her calf.

Tom was going on home to change his clothes; but when Ruth saw the fringe of icicles around the bottoms of his trouser legs, she would not hear to it.

“You come right in with us, Tom.  Helen will drive the car home and get you a change of clothing.  Meanwhile you can put on some of Uncle Jabez’s old clothes.  Hurry on, now, children!” and she laughingly drove Tom and Hazel Gray before her to the porch of the old house, where Aunt Alvirah, having heard the automobile, met them in amazement.