“All right, Mrs. Lindsay.  You do not know who she is, then?”

“No, sir, and perhaps it is as well that I should not know.  Then I shall not have to answer any questions about it.”

“Very good, madam,—­just as it should be.  And your family, are they as discreet as yourself?”

“Not one word of the whole story has been or will be told by any one of us.  That was agreed upon among us.”

“Now then, madam.  My name, as you heard me say, is Byles Gridley.  Your husband will know it, perhaps; at any rate I will wait until he comes back.  This child is of good family and of good name.  I know her well, and mean, with your kind help, to save her from the consequences which her foolish adventure might have brought upon her.  Before the bells ring for meeting to-morrow morning this girl must be in her bed at her home, at Oxbow Village, and we must keep her story to ourselves as far as may be.  It will all blow over, if we do.  The gossips will only know that she was upset in the river and cared for by some good people,—­good people and sensible people too, Mrs. Lindsay.  And now I want to see the young man that rescued my friend here,—­Clement Lindsay, I have heard his name before.”

Clement was not a beauty for the moment, but Master Gridley saw well enough that he was a young man of the right kind.  He knew them at sight, fellows with lime enough in their bones and iron enough in their blood to begin with,—­shapely, large-nerved, firm-fibred and fine-fibred, with well-spread bases to their heads for the ground-floor of the faculties, and well-vaulted arches for the upper range of apprehensions and combinations.  “Plenty of basements,” he used to say, “without attics and skylights.  Plenty of skylights without rooms enough and space enough below.”  But here was “a three-story brain,” he said to himself as he looked at it, and this was the youth who was to find his complement in our pretty little Susan Posey!  His judgment may seem to have been hasty, but he took the measure of young men of twenty at sight from long and sagacious observation, as Nurse Byloe knew the “heft” of a baby the moment she fixed her old eyes on it.

Clement was well acquainted with Byles Gridley, though he had never seen him, for Susan’s letters had had a good deal to say about him of late.  It was agreed between them that the story should be kept as quiet as possible, and that the young girl should not know the name of her deliverer,—­it might save awkward complications.  It was not likely that she would be disposed to talk of her adventure, which had ended so disastrously, and thus the whole story would soon die out.