“Do you really think I would, Grizel!” he cried indignantly.

“Rather than see the dear house go into another’s hands,” she answered steadily; “for I am determined to leave it.  Dr. McQueen won’t feel strange when he looks down, David, if it is only you he sees moving about the old rooms, instead of me.”

“You are doing this for me, Grizel, and I won’t have it.”

“I give you my word,” she told him, “that I am doing it for myself alone.  I am tired of keeping a house, and of all its worries.  Men don’t know what they are.”

She was smiling, but his brows wrinkled in pain.  “Oh, Grizel!” he said, and stopped.  And then he cried, “Since when has Grizel ceased to care for housekeeping?”

She did not say since when.  I don’t know whether she knew; but it was since she and Tommy had ceased to correspond.  David’s words showed her too suddenly how she had changed, and it was then that she broke down before him—­because she had ceased to care for housekeeping.

But she had her way, and early in the new year David and his wife were established in their new home, with all Grizel’s furniture, except such as was needed for the two rooms rented by her from Gavinia.  She would have liked to take away the old doctor’s chair, because it was the bit of him left behind when he died, and then for that very reason she did not.  She no longer wanted him to see her always.  “I am not so nice as I used to be, and I want to keep it from you,” she said to the chair when she kissed it good-bye.

Was Grizel not as nice as she used to be?  How can I answer, who love her the more only?  There is one at least, Grizel, who will never desert you.

Ah, but was she?

I seem again to hear the warning voice of Grizel, and this time she is crying:  “You know I was not.”

She knew it so well that she could say it to herself quite calmly.  She knew that, with whatever repugnance she drove those passions away, they would come back—­yes, and for a space be welcomed back.  Why does she leave Gavinia’s blue hearth this evening, and seek the solitary Den?  She has gone to summon them, and she knows it.  They come thick in the Den, for they know the place.  It was there that her mother was wont to walk with them.  Have they been waiting for you in the Den, Grizel, all this time?  Have you found your mother’s legacy at last?

Don’t think that she sought them often.  It was never when she seemed to have anything to live for.  Tommy would not write to her, and so did not want her to write to him; but if that bowed her head, it never made her rebel.  She still had her many duties.  Whatever she suffered, so long as she could say, “I am helping him,” she was in heart and soul the Grizel of old.  In his fits of remorse, which were many, he tried to produce work that would please her.  Thus, in a heroic attempt to be practical, he wrote a political article in one of the reviews, quite in the ordinary style,