Ah, what a brother!  They said it openly to their own brothers, and to Tommy in the way they looked at him.

“There has been nothing like it,” he assured Grizel, “since Red Riding-hood and the wolf.  Why can’t I fling off my disguise and cry, ‘The better to eat you with!’”

He always spoke to her now in this vein of magnificent bitterness, but Grizel seldom rewarded him by crying, “Oh, oh!” She might, however, give him a patient, reproachful glance instead, and it had the irritating effect of making him feel that perhaps he was under life-size, instead of over it.

“I daresay you are right,” says Tommy, savagely.

“I said nothing.”

“You don’t need to say it.  What a grand capacity you have for knocking me off my horse, Grizel!”

“Are you angry with me for that?”

“No; it is delicious to pick one’s self out of the mud, especially when you find it is a baby you are picking up, instead of a brute.  Am I a baby only, Grizel?”

“I think it is childish of you,” she replied, “to say you are a brute.”

“There is not to be even that satisfaction left to me!  You are hard on me, Grizel.”

“I am trying to help you.  How can you be angry with me?”

“The instinct of self-preservation, I suppose.  I see myself dwindling so rapidly under your treatment that soon there will be nothing of me left.”

It was said cruelly, for he knew that the one thing Grizel could not bear now was the implication that she saw his faults only.  She always went down under that blow with pitiful surrender, showing the woman suddenly, as if under a physical knouting.

He apologized contritely.  “But, after all, it proves my case,” he said, “for I could not hurt you in this way, Grizel, if I were not a pretty well-grown specimen of a monster.”

“Don’t,” she said; but she did not seek to help him by drawing him away to other subjects, which would have been his way.  “What is there monstrous,” she asked, “in your being so good to Elspeth?  It is very kind of you to give her all these things.”

“Especially when by rights they are yours, Grizel!”

“No, not when you did not want to give them to me.”

He dared say nothing to that; there were some matters on which he must not contradict Grizel now.

“It is nice of you,” she said, “not to complain, though Elspeth is deserting you.  It must have been a blow.”

“You and I only know why,” he answered.  “But for her, Grizel, I might be whining sentiment to you at this moment.”

“That,” she said, “would be the monstrous thing.”

“And it is not monstrous, I suppose, that I should let Gemmell press my hand under the conviction that, after all, I am a trump.”

“You don’t pose as one.”

“That makes them think the more highly of me!  Nothing monstrous, Grizel, in my standing quietly by while you are showing Elspeth how to furnish her house—­I, who know why you have the subject at your finger-tips!”