Do you see that Tommy was doing all this for Grizel and pretending to her that it was for himself?  He was passionately desirous of making amends, and he was to do it in the most generous way.  Perhaps he believed when he seemed to enter her room saying, “Grizel, I have come back,” that she loved him still; perhaps he knew that he did not love in the way he said; perhaps he saw a remorseful man making splendid atonement:  but never should she know these things; tenderly as he had begun he would go on to the end.  Here at last is a Tommy worth looking at, and he looked.

Yet as he drew near Thrums, after almost exactly two days of continuous travel, many a shiver went down his back, for he could not be sure that he should find Grizel here; he sometimes seemed to see her lying ill at some wayside station in Switzerland, in France; everything that could have happened to her he conceived, and he moved restlessly in the carriage.  His mouth went dry.

“Has she come back?”

The train had stopped for the taking of tickets, and his tremulous question checked the joy of Corp at sight of him.

“She’s back,” Corp answered in an excited whisper; and oh, the relief to Tommy!  “She came back by the afternoon train; but I had scarce a word wi’ her, she was so awid to be hame.  ‘I am going home,’ she cried, and hurried away up the brae.  Ay, and there’s one queer thing.”

“What?”

“Her luggage wasna in the van.”

Tommy could smile at that.  “But what sent her,” he asked eagerly, “on that journey?”

Corp told him the little he knew.  “But nobody kens except me and Gavinia,” he said.  We pretend she gaed to London to see her father.  We said he had wrote to her, wanting her to go to him.  Gavinia said it would never do to let folk ken she had gaen to see you, and even Elspeth doesna ken.”

“Is Elspeth back?”

“They came back yesterday.”

Did David know the truth from Grizel? was what Tommy was asking himself now as he strode up the brae.  But again he was in luck, for when he had explained away his abrupt return to Elspeth, and been joyfully welcomed by her, she told him that her husband had been in one of the glens all day.  “He does not know that Grizel has come back,” she said.  “Oh,” she exclaimed, “but you don’t even know that she has been away!  Grizel has been in London.”

“Corp told me,” said Tommy.

“And did he tell you why she had gone?”

“Yes.”

“She came back an hour or two ago.  Maggy Ann saw her go past.  Fancy her seeing her father at last!  It must have been an ordeal for her.  I wonder what took place.”