“Does she mean to her father’s house?” Ailie asked.

This was what started the report that, touched no doubt by her illness, Grizel’s unknown father had, after all, offered her a home.  They discovered, however, what Grizel meant by home when, one afternoon, she escaped, unseen, from the doctor’s house, and was found again at Double Dykes, very indignant because someone had stolen the furniture.

She seemed to know all her old friends except Elspeth, who was still Alice to her.  Seldom now did she put her hands over her ears, or see horrible mountains marching with her.  She no longer remembered, save once or twice when she woke up, that she had ever been out of Thrums.  To those who saw her casually she was Grizel—­gone thin and pale and weak intellectually, but still the Grizel of old, except for the fixed idea that Double Dykes was her home.

“You must not humour her in that delusion,” David said sternly to Tommy; “when we cease to fight it we have abandoned hope.”

So the weapon he always had his hand on was taken from Tommy, for he would not abandon hope.  He fought gallantly.  It was always he who brought her back from Double Dykes.  She would not leave it with any other person, but she came away with him.

“It’s because she’s so fond o’ him,” Corp said.

But it was not.  It was because she feared him, as all knew who saw them together.  They were seen together a great deal when she was able to go out.  Driving seemed to bring back the mountains to her eyes, so she walked, and it was always with the help of Tommy’s arm.  “It’s a most pitiful sight,” the people said.  They pitied him even more than her, for though she might be talking gaily to him and leaning heavily on him, they could see that she mistrusted him.  At the end of a sweet smile she would give him an ugly, furtive look.

“She’s like a cat you’ve forced into your lap,” they said, “and it lies quiet there, ready to jump the moment you let go your grip.”

They wondered would he never weary.  He never wearied.  Day after day he was saying the same things to her, and the end was always as the beginning.  They came back to her entreaty that she should be allowed to go home as certainly as they came back to the doctor’s house.

“It is a long time, you know, Grizel, since you lived at Double Dykes—­not since you were a child.”

“Not since I was a child,” she said as if she quite understood.

“Then you went to live with your dear, kind doctor, you remember.  What was his name?”

“Dr. McQueen.  I love him.”

“But he died, and he left you his house to live in.  It is your home, Grizel.  He would be so grieved if he thought you did not make it your home.”

“It is my home,” she said proudly; but when they returned to it she was loath to go in.  “I want to go home!” she begged.

One day he took her to her rooms in Corp’s house, thinking her old furniture would please her; and that was the day when she rocked her arms joyously again.  But it was not the furniture that made her so happy; it was Corp’s baby.