Myrtle’s eyes fell,—­a new suspicion seemed to have suggested itself.

“He wanted to get up a spiritual intimacy with our Susan Posey,—­a very pretty girl, as you know.”

Myrtle tossed her head almost imperceptibly, and bit her lip.

“I suppose there are a dozen young people that have been talked about with him.  He preaches cruel sermons in his pulpit, cruel as death, and cold-blooded enough to freeze any mother’s blood if nature did not tell her he lied, and then smooths it all over with the first good-looking young woman he can get to listen to him.”

Myrtle had dropped the slipper she was working on.

“Tell me, my dear, would you be willing to give up meeting this man alone, and gratify my friend, and avoid all occasion of reproach?”

“Of course I would,” said Myrtle, her eyes flashing, for her doubts, her shame, her pride, were all excited.  “Who is your friend, Mr. Gridley?”

“An excellent woman,—­Mrs. Hopkins.  You know her, Gifted Hopkins’s mother, with whom I am residing.  Shall the minister be given to understand that you will see him hereafter in her company?”

Myrtle came pretty near a turn of her old nervous perturbations.  “As you say,” she answered.  “Is there nobody that I can trust, or is everybody hunting me like a bird?” She hid her face in her hands.

“You can trust me, my dear,” said Byles Gridley.  “Take your needle, my child, and work at your pattern,—­it will come out a rose by and by.  Life is like that, Myrtle, one stitch at a time, taken patiently, and the pattern will come out all right like the embroidery.  You can trust me.  Good-by, my dear.”

“Let her finish the slippers,” the old man said to himself as he trudged home, “and make ’em big enough for Father Pemberton.  He shall have his feet in ’em yet, or my name is n’t Byles Gridley!”

CHAPTER XV.

Arrival of reinforcements.

Myrtle Hazard waited until the steps of Master Byles Gridley had ceased to be heard, as he walked in his emphatic way through the long entry of the old mansion.  Then she went to her little chamber and sat down in a sort of revery.  She could not doubt his sincerity, and there was something in her own consciousness which responded to the suspicions he had expressed with regard to the questionable impulses of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker.

It is not in the words that others say to us, but in those other words which these make us say to ourselves, that we find our gravest lessons and our sharpest rebukes.  The hint another gives us finds whole trains of thought which have been getting themselves ready to be shaped in inwardly articulated words, and only awaited the touch of a burning syllable, as the mottoes of a pyrotechnist only wait for a spark to become letters of fire.