“She cannot be in a house where there is a child!” said Tommy, with a bitter laugh.  “Gemmell, it is Grizel we are speaking of!  Do you remember what she was?”

“I remember.”

“Well, where are we to send her?”

David turned his pained eyes full on Tommy.

“No!” Tommy cried vehemently.

“Sandys,” said David, firmly, “that is what it has come to.  They will take good care of her.”  He sat down with a groan.  “Have done with heroics,” he said savagely, when Tommy would have spoken.  “I have been prepared for this; there is no other way.”

“I have been prepared for it, too,” Tommy said, controlling himself; “but there is another way:  I can marry her, and I am going to do it.”

“I don’t know that I can countenance that,” David said, after a pause.  “It seems an infernal shame.”

“Don’t trouble about me,” replied Tommy, hoarsely; “I shall do it willingly.”

And then it was the doctor’s turn to laugh.  “You!” he said with a terrible scorn as he looked Tommy up and down.  “I was not thinking of you.  All my thoughts were of her.  I was thinking how cruel to her if some day she came to her right mind and found herself tied for life to the man who had brought her to this pass.”

Tommy winced and walked up and down.

“Desire to marry her gone?” asked David, savagely.

“No,” Tommy said.  He sat down.  “You have the key to me, Gemmell,” he went on quietly.  “I gave it to you.  You know I am a man of sentiment only; but you are without a scrap of it yourself, and so you will never quite know what it is.  It has its good points.  We are a kindly people.  I was perhaps pluming myself on having made an heroic proposal, and though you have made me see it just now as you see it, as you see it I shall probably soon be putting on the same grand airs again.  Lately I discovered that the children who see me with Grizel call me ‘the Man with the Greetin’ Eyes.’  If I have greetin’ eyes it was real grief that gave them to me; but when I heard what I was called it made me self-conscious, and I have tried to look still more lugubrious ever since.  It seems monstrous to you, but that, I believe, is the kind of thing I shall always be doing.  But it does not mean that I feel no real remorse.  They were greetin’ eyes before I knew it, and though I may pose grotesquely as a fine fellow for finding Grizel a home where there is no child and can never be a child, I shall not cease, night nor day, from tending her.  It will be a grim business, Gemmell, as you know, and if I am Sentimental Tommy through it all, why grudge me my comic little strut?”

David said, “You can’t take her to London.”

“I shall take her to wherever she wants to go.”

“There is one place only she wants to go to, and that is Double Dykes.”

“I am prepared to take her there.”

“And your work?”

“It must take second place now.  I must write; it is the only thing I can do.  If I could make a living at anything else I would give up writing altogether.”