For Grizel had given all her sweet ideas to Elspeth.  Heigh-ho! how she had guarded them once, confiding them half reluctantly even to Tommy; half reluctantly, that is, at the start, because they were her very own, but once she was embarked on the subject talking with such rapture that every minute or two he had to beg her to be calm.  She was the first person in that part of the world to think that old furniture need not be kept in the dark corners, and she knew where there was an oak bedstead that was looked upon as a disgrace, and where to obtain the dearest cupboards, one of them in use as the retiring-chamber of a rabbit-hutch, and stately clocks made in the town a hundred years ago, and quaint old-farrant lamps and cogeys and sand-glasses that apologized if you looked at them, and yet were as willing to be loved again as any old lady in a mutch.  You will not buy them easily now, the people will not chuckle at you when you bid for them now.  We have become so cute in Thrums that when the fender breaks we think it may have increased in value, and we preserve any old board lest the worms have made it artistic.  Grizel, however, was in advance of her time.  She could lay her hands on all she wanted, and she did, but it was for Elspeth’s house.

“And the table-cloths and the towels and the sheets,” said Tommy.  “Nothing monstrous in my letting you give Elspeth them?”

The linen, you see, was no longer in Grizel’s press.

“I could not help making them,” she answered, “they were so longing to be made.  I did not mean to give them to her.  I think I meant to put them back in the press, but when they were made it was natural that they should want to have something to do.  So I gave them to Elspeth.”

“With how many tears on them?”

“Not many.  But with some kisses.”

“All which,” says Tommy, “goes to prove that I have nothing with which to reproach myself!”

“No, I never said that,” she told him.  “You have to reproach yourself with wanting me to love you.”

She paused a moment to let him say, if he dared, that he had not done that, when she would have replied instantly, “You know you did.”  He could have disabused her, but it would have been cruel, and so on this subject, as ever, he remained silent.

“But that is not what I have been trying to prove,” she continued.  “You know as well as I that the cause of this unhappiness has been—­what you call your wings.”

He was about to thank her for her delicacy in avoiding its real name, when she added, “I mean your sentiment,” and he laughed instead.

“I flatter myself that I no longer fly, at all events,” he said.  “I know what I am at last, Grizel”

“It is flattery only,” she replied with her old directness.  “This thing you are regarding with a morbid satisfaction is not you at all.”

He groaned.  “Which of them all is me, Grizel?” he asked gloomily.