The effect of the violent shock she had experienced was to change the whole nature of Myrtle for the time.  Her mind was unsettled:  she could hardly recall anything except the plunge over the fall.  She was perfectly docile and plastic,—­was ready to go anywhere Mr. Gridley wanted her to go, without any sign of reluctance.  And so it was agreed that he should carry her back in his covered wagon that very night.  All possible arrangements were made to render her journey comfortable.  The fast mare had to trot very gently, and the old master would stop and adjust the pillows from time to time, and administer the restoratives which the physician had got ready, all as naturally and easily as if he had been bred a nurse, vastly to his own surprise, and with not a little gain to his self-appreciation.  He was a serviceable kind of body on occasion, after all, was he not, hey, Mr. Byles Gridley? he said to himself.

At half past four o’clock on Sunday morning the shepherd brought the stray lamb into the paved yard at The Poplars, and roused the slumbering household to receive back the wanderer.

It was the Irishwoman, Kitty Fagan, huddled together in such amorphous guise, that she looked as if she had been fitted in a tempest of petticoats and a whirlwind of old shawls, who presented herself at the door.

But there was a very warm heart somewhere in that queer-looking bundle of clothes, and it was not one of those that can throb or break in silence.  When she saw the long covered wagon, and the grave face of the old master, she thought it was all over with the poor girl she loved, and that this was the undertaker’s wagon bringing back only what had once been Myrtle Hazard.  She screamed aloud,—­so wildly that Myrtle lifted her head from the pillow against which she had rested it, and started forward.

The Irishwoman looked at her for a moment to assure herself that it was the girl she loved, and not her ghost.  Then it all came over her,—­she had been stolen by thieves, who had carried her off by night, and been rescued by the brave old man who had brought her back.  What crying and kisses and prayers and blessings were poured forth, in a confusion of which her bodily costume was a fitting type, those who know the vocabulary and the enthusiasm of her eloquent race may imagine better than we could describe it.

The welcome of the two other women was far less demonstrative.  There were awful questions to be answered before the kind of reception she was to have could be settled.  What they were, it is needless to suggest; but while Miss Silence was weeping, first with joy that her “responsibility” was removed, then with a fair share of pity and kindness, and other lukewarm emotions,—­while Miss Badlam waited for an explanation before giving way to her feelings,—­Mr. Gridley put the essential facts before them in a few words.  She had gone down the river some miles in her boat, which was upset