Tommy went into the house, and she was so pleased to see him that she quite simpered.  He put his arms round her, and she lay there with a little giggle of contentment.  She was in a plot of heat.

“Grizel!  Oh, my God!” he said, “why do you look at me in that way?”

She passed her hand across her eyes, like one trying to think.

“I woke up,” she said at last.  Corp appeared at the window now, and she pointed to him in terror.  Thus had she seen her mother point, in the long ago, at faces that came there to frighten her.

“Grizel,” Tommy entreated her, “you know who I am, don’t you?”

She said his name at once, but her eyes were on the window.  “They want to take me away,” she whispered.

“But you must come away, Grizel.  You must come home.”

“This is home,” she said.  “It is sweet.”

After much coaxing, he prevailed upon her to leave.  With his arm round her, and a terrible woe on his face, he took her to the doctor’s house.  She had her hands over her ears all the way.  She thought the white river and the mountains and the villages and the crack of whips were marching with her still.

CHAPTER XXXI

“The man with the greetin’ eyes”

For many days she lay in a fever at the doctor’s house, seeming sometimes to know where she was, but more often not, and night after night a man with a drawn face sat watching her.  They entreated, they forced him to let them take his place; but from his room he heard her moan or speak, or he thought he heard her, or he heard a terrible stillness, and he stole back to listen; they might send him away, but when they opened the door he was there, with his drawn face.  And often they were glad to see him, for there were times when he alone could interpret her wild demands and soothe those staring eyes.

Once a scream startled the house.  Someone had struck a match in the darkened chamber, and she thought she was in an arbour in St. Gian.  They had to hold her in her bed by force at times; she had such a long way to walk before night, she said.

She would struggle into a sitting posture and put her hands over her ears.

Her great desire was not to sleep.  “I should wake up,” she explained fearfully.

She took a dislike to Elspeth, and called her “Alice.”

These ravings, they said to each other, must have reference to what happened to her when she was away, and as they thought he knew no more of her wanderings than they, everyone marvelled at the intuition with which he read her thoughts.  It was he who guessed that the striking of matches somehow terrified her; he who discovered that it was a horrid roaring river she thought she heard, and he pretended he heard it too, and persuaded her that if she lay very still it would run past.  Nothing she said or did puzzled him.  He read the raving of her mind, they declared admiringly, as if he held the cipher to it.