“You always liked him,” said Elspeth, clinging eagerly to that.

“No one could help liking him, Elspeth, he has such winning ways,” said Tommy, perhaps a little in the voice with which at funerals we refer to the departed.  She loved his words, but she knew she had a surprise for him this time, and she tried to blurt it out.

“He said something to me.  He—­oh, what a high opinion he has of you!” (She really thought he had.)

“Was that the something?” Tommy asked, with a smile that helped her, as it was meant to do.

“You understand, don’t you?” she said, almost in a whisper.

“Of course I do, Elspeth,” he answered reassuringly; but somehow she still thought he didn’t.

“No one could have been more manly and gentle and humble,” she said beseechingly.

“I am sure of it,” said Tommy.

“He thinks nothing of himself,” she said.

“We shall always think a great deal of him,” replied Tommy.

“Yes, but——­” Elspeth found the strangest difficulty in continuing, for, though it would have surprised him to be told so, Tommy was not helping her nearly as much as he imagined.

“I told him,” she said, shaking, “that no one could be to me what you were.  I told him——­” and then timid Elspeth altogether broke down.  Tommy drew her to him, as he had so often done since she was the smallest child, and pressed her head against his breast, and waited.  So often he had waited thus upon Elspeth.

“There is nothing to cry about, dear,” he said tenderly, when the time to speak came.  “You have, instead, the right to be proud that so good a man loves you.  I am very proud of it, Elspeth.”

“If I could be sure of that!” she gasped.

“Don’t you believe me, dear?”

“Yes, but—­that is not what makes me cry.  Tommy, don’t you see?”

“Yes,” he assured her, “I see.  You are crying because you feel so sorry for him.  But I don’t feel sorry for him, Elspeth.  If I know anything at all, it is this:  that no man needs pity who sincerely loves; whether that love be returned or not, he walks in a new and more beautiful world for evermore.”

She clutched his hand.  “I don’t understand how you know those things,” she whispered.

Please God, was Tommy’s reflection, she should never know.  He saw most vividly the pathos of his case, but he did not break down under it; it helped him, rather, to proceed.

“It will be the test of Gemmell,” he said, “how he bears this.  No man, I am very sure, was ever told that his dream could not come true more kindly and tenderly than you told it to him.”  He was in the middle of the next sentence (a fine one) before her distress stopped him.

“Tommy,” she cried, “you don’t understand.  That is not what I told him at all!”

It was one of the few occasions on which the expression on the face of T. Sandys perceptibly changed.