“Oh, you dear!  How are you getting on?” cried Helen, kissing her impulsively and as glad to see Ruth as though they had been separated for days instead of for only a few hours.  “Colfax wanted to drive down to the station alone for Daddy—­ for we won’t bring poor Tom home in this rain—­ but I just couldn’t resist coming to see how you were getting on.”  She looked around with big eyes.  “How does the Ogre treat you?” she whispered.

But Ruth could laugh now and did so, saying, cheerfully:  “He hasn’t eaten me up yet!  And Aunt Alvirah is the dearest little lady who ever lived.”

“She likes you, then?”

“Of course she does.”

“I knew she would, she was bound to love you.  But I don’t know about the Ogre,” and she shook her head.  “But there!  I must run.  We don’t want to be late for the train.  That will put Daddy out.  And I must stop and see Tom at the doctor’s, too.”

“I hope you will find your brother ever so mach better,” cried Ruth, as her friend ran down the walk again.

“You’ll see him come by here to-morrow, if it quits raining,” returned Helen, over her shoulder.

But it did not stop raining that night, nor for a full week.  The scuds of rain, blowing across the river, slapped sharply against the side of the house, and against Ruth’s window all night.  She did not sleep that first night as well as she had in the charitable home of the station master and his good wife.  The evening meal had been as stiff and unpleasant as the noon meal.  The evening was spent in the same room—­ the kitchen.  Aunt Alviry knitted and sewed; Uncle Jabez pored over certain accounts and counted money very softly behind the uplifted cover of the japanned cash-box that he had brought in from the mill.

She got in time to know that cash-box very well indeed.  It often came into the house under Uncle Jabez’s arm at dinner, too.  He scarcely seemed willing to trust it out of his sight.  And Ruth was sure that he locked himself into his room with it at night.

A loaded shotgun lay upon rests over the kitchen door all the time, and there was a big, two-barreled, muzzle-loading pistol on the stand beside Uncle Jabez’s bed.  Ruth was much more afraid of these loaded weapons than she was of burglars.  But the old man evidently expected to be attacked for his wealth at some time although, Aunt Alvirah told her, nobody had ever troubled him in all the years she had lived at the Red Mill.

So it was not fear of marauders that kept Ruth so wakeful on this first night under her uncle’s roof.  She thought of all the kind friends she had left in Darrowtown, and her long journey here, and her cold welcome to what she supposed would be her future home.  Without Helen, and without Aunt Alvirah, she knew she would have gotten up, put on her clothing, packed her bag, and run away in the rain to some other place.  She could not have stood Uncle Jabez alone.

Jabez Potter was hoarding up something besides money, too.  Ruth did not understand this until it had already rained several days, and the roaring of the waters fretting against the river banks and against the dam, had become all but deafening in her ears.