One of them was:  “Things will be far wrong with Grizel when she is able to sit idle with her hands in her lap.”

Another:  “She is almost pitifully straightforward, man.  Everything that is in Grizel must out.  She can hide nothing.”

Yet how cunningly she had concealed what was in her hands.  Cunning applied to Grizel!  David shuddered.  He thought of Tommy, and shut his mouth tight.  He could do this easily.  Tommy could not do it without feeling breathless.  They were types of two kinds of men.

David also remembered a promise he had given McQueen, and wondered, as he had wondered a good deal of late, whether the time had come to keep it.

But Grizel sat on with her unopened letter.  She was to meet Tommy presently on the croquet lawn of the Dovecot, when Ailie was to play Mr. James (the champion), and she decided that she must wait till then.  She would know what sort of letter it was the moment she saw his face.  And then!  She pressed her hands together.

Oh, how base of her to doubt him!  She said it to herself then and often afterwards.  She looked mournfully in her mother’s long mirror at this disloyal Grizel, as if the capacity to doubt him was the saddest of all the changes that had come to her.  He had been so true yesterday; oh, how could she tremble to-day?  Beautiful yesterday! but yesterday may seem so long ago.  How little a time had passed between the moment when she was greeting him joyously in Caddam Wood and that cry of the heart, “How could you hurt your Grizel so!” No, she could not open her letter.  She could kiss it, but she could not open it.

Foolish fears! for before she had shaken hands with Tommy in Mrs. McLean’s garden she knew he loved her still, and that the letter proved it.  She was properly punished, yet surely in excess, for when she might have been reading her first love-letter, she had to join in discussions with various ladies about Berlin wool and the like, and to applaud the prowess of Mr. James with the loathly croquet mallet.  It seemed quite a long time before Tommy could get a private word with her.  Then he began about the letter at once.

“You are not angry with me for writing it?” he asked anxiously.  “I should not have done it; I had no right:  but such a desire to do it came over me, I had to; it was such a glory to me to say in writing what you are to me.”

She smiled happily.  Oh, exquisite day!  “I have so long wanted to have a letter from you,” she said.  “I have almost wished you would go away for a little time, so that I might have a letter from you.”

He had guessed this.  He had written to give her delight.

“Did you like the first words of it, Grizel?” he asked eagerly.

The lover and the artist spoke together.

Could she admit that the letter was unopened, and why?  Oh, the pain to him!  She nodded assent.  It was not really an untruth, she told herself.  She did like them—­oh, how she liked them, though she did not know what they were!