“We shall see,” she said, “when we have got the wings off.”

“They will have to come off a feather at a time.”

“That,” she declared, “is what I have been trying to prove.”

“It will be a weary task, Grizel.”

“I won’t weary at it,” she said, smiling.

Her cheerfulness was a continual surprise to him.  “You bear up wonderfully well yourself,” he sometimes said to her, almost reproachfully, and she never replied that, perhaps, that was one of her ways of trying to help him.

She is not so heartbroken, after all, you may be saying, and I had promised to break her heart.  But, honestly, I don’t know how to do it more thoroughly, and you must remember that we have not seen her alone yet.

She tried to be very little alone.  She helped David in his work more than ever; not a person, for instance, managed to escape the bath because Grizel’s heart was broken.  You could never say that she was alone when her needle was going, and the linen became sheets and the like, in what was probably record time.  Yet they could have been sewn more quickly; for at times the needle stopped and she did not know it.  Once a bedridden old woman, with whom she had been sitting up, lay watching her instead of sleeping, and finally said:  “What makes you sit staring at a cauld fire, and speaking to yourself?” And there was a strange day when she had been too long in the Den.  When she started for home she went in the direction of Double Dykes, her old home, instead.

She could bear everything except doubt.  She had told him so, when he wondered at her calmness; she often said it to herself.  She could tread any path, however drearily it stretched before her, so long as she knew whither it led, but there could be no more doubt.  Oh, he must never again disturb her mind with hope!  How clearly she showed him that, and yet they had perhaps no more than parted when it seemed impossible to bear for the next hour the desolation she was sentenced to for life.  She lay quivering and tossing on the hearth-rug of the parlour, beating it with her fists, rocking her arms, and calling to him to give her doubt again, that she might get through the days.

“Let me doubt again!” Here was Grizel starting to beg it of him.  More than once she got half-way to Aaron’s house before she could turn; but she always did turn, with the words unspoken; never did Tommy hear her say them, but always that she was tranquil now.  Was it pride that supported her in the trying hour?  Oh, no, it was not pride.  That is an old garment, which once became Grizel well, but she does not wear it now; she takes it out of the closet, perhaps, at times to look at it.  What gave her strength when he was by was her promise to help him.  It was not by asking for leave to dream herself that she could make him dream the less.  All done for you, Tommy!  It might have helped you to loosen a few of the feathers.