“He forbids it?” Gemmell asked mercilessly.

She stamped her foot, not in rage, but in hopelessness.  “How incapable you are of doing him justice!” she cried.  “If you only knew——­”

“Tell me.  I want to do him justice.”

She sat down again, sighing.  “My attempt to regain my old power over you has not been very successful, has it, David?  We must not quarrel, though”—­holding out her hand, which he grasped.  “And you won’t question me any more?” She said it appealingly.

“Never again,” he answered.  “I never wanted to question you, Grizel.  I wanted only to marry you.”

“And that can’t be.”

“I don’t see it,” he said, so stoutly that she was almost amused.  But he would not be pushed aside.  He had something more to say.

“Dr. McQueen wished it,” he said; “above all else in the world he wished it.  He often told me so.”

“He never said that to me,” Grizel replied quickly.

“Because he thought that to press you was no way to make you care for me.  He hoped that it would come about.”

“It has not come about, David, with either of us,” she said gently.  “I am sure that would have been sufficient answer to him.”

“No, Grizel, it would not, not now.”

He had risen, and his face was whiter than she had ever seen it.

“I am going to hurt you, Grizel,” he said, and every word was a pang to him.  “I see no other way.  It has got to be done.  Dr. McQueen often talked to me about the things that troubled you when you were a little girl—­the morbid fears you had then, and that had all been swept away years before I knew you.  But though they had been long gone, you were so much to him that he tried to think of everything that might happen to you in the future, and he foresaw that they might possibly come back.  ‘If she were ever to care for some false loon!’ he has said to me, and then, Grizel, he could not go on.”

Grizel beat her hands.  “If he could not go on,” she said, “it was not because he feared what I should do.”

“No, no,” David answered eagerly, “he never feared for that, but for your happiness.  He told me of a boy who used to torment you, oh, all so long ago, and of such little account that he had forgotten his name.  But that boy has come back, and you care for him, and he is a false loon, Grizel.”

She had risen too, and was flashing fire on David; but he went on.

“‘If the time ever comes,’ he said to me, ’when you see her in torture from such a cause, speak to her openly about it.  Tell her it is I who am speaking through you.  It will be a hard task to you, but wrestle through with it, David, in memory of any little kindness I may have done you, and the great love I bore my Grizel.’”

She was standing rigid now.  “Is there any more, David?” she said in a low voice.

“Only this.  I admired you then as I admire you now.  I may not love you, Grizel, but of this I am very sure”—­he was speaking steadily, he was forgetting no one—­“that you are the noblest and bravest woman I have ever known, and I promised—­he did not draw the promise from me, I gave it to him—­that if I was a free man and could help you in any way without paining you by telling you these things, I would try that way first.”