“It makes her so happy,” Grizel said, “that when I seem to see her now she looks as sweet and pure as she must have been in the days when she was an innocent girl.  I think she can enter into my feelings more than any other person could ever do.  Is that because she was my mother?  She understands how I feel just as I can understand how in the end she was willing to be bad because he wanted it so much.”

“No, no, Grizel,” Tommy cried passionately, “you don’t understand that!”

She rocked her arms.  “Yes, I do,” she said; “I do.  I could never have cared for such a man; but I can understand how mamma yielded to him, and I have no feeling for her except pity, and I have told her so, and it is what she loves to hear her daughter tell her best of all.”

They put the subject from them, and she told him what it was that she had come to rub out in Caddam.  If you have read of Tommy’s boyhood you may remember the day it ended with his departure for the farm, and that he and Elspeth walked through Caddam to the cart that was to take him from her, and how, to comfort her, he swore that he loved her with his whole heart, and Grizel not at all, and that Grizel was in the wood and heard.  And how Elspeth had promised to wave to Tommy in the cart as long as it was visible, but broke down and went home sobbing, and how Grizel took her place and waved, pretending to be Elspeth, so that he might think she was bearing up bravely.  Tommy had not known what Grizel did for him that day, and when he heard it now for the first time from her own lips, he realized afresh what a glorious girl she was and had always been.

“You may try to rub that memory out of little Grizel’s head,” he declared, looking very proudly at her, “but you shall never rub it out of mine.”

It was by his wish that they went together to the spot where she had heard him say that he loved Elspeth only—­“if you can find it,” Tommy said, “after all these years”; and she smiled at his mannish words—­she had found it so often since!  There was the very clump of whin.

And here was the boy to match.  Oh, who by striving could make himself a boy again as Tommy could!  I tell you he was always irresistible then.  What is genius?  It is the power to be a boy again at will.  When I think of him flinging off the years and whistling childhood back, not to himself only, but to all who heard, distributing it among them gaily, imperiously calling on them to dance, dance, for they are boys and girls again until they stop—­when to recall him in those wild moods is to myself to grasp for a moment at the dear dead days that were so much the best, I cannot wonder that Grizel loved him.  I am his slave myself; I see that all that was wrong with Tommy was that he could not always be a boy.