He did not know what had happened.  When he knew, a terror that this could not last seized him.  He was concealing it while he answered her puzzled questions.  All the time he was telling her how they came to be there, he was watching in agony for the change.

She remembered everything up to her return to Thrums; then she walked into a mist.

“The truth,” she begged of him, when he would have led her off by pretending that she had been ill only.  Surely it was the real Grizel who begged for the truth.  She took his hand and held it when he told her of their marriage.  She cried softly, because she feared that she might again become as she had been; but he said that was impossible, and smiled confidently, and all the time he was watching in agony for the change.

“Do you forgive me, Grizel?  I have always had a dread that when you recovered you would cease to care for me.”  He knew that this would please her if she was the real Grizel, and he was so anxious to make her happy for evermore.

She put his hand to her lips and smiled at him through her tears.  Hers was a love that could never change.  Suddenly she sat up.  “Whose baby was it?” she asked.

“I don’t know what you mean, Grizel,” he said uneasily.

“I remember vaguely,” she told him, “a baby in white whom I seemed to chase, but I could never catch her.  Was it a dream only?”

“You are thinking of Elspeth’s little girl, perhaps.  She was often brought to see you.”

“Has Elspeth a baby?” She rose to go exultantly to Elspeth.

“But too small a baby, Grizel, to run from you, even if she wanted to.”

“What is she like?”

“She is always laughing.”

“The sweet!” Grizel rocked her arms in rapture and smiled her crooked smile at the thought of a child who was always laughing.  “But I don’t remember her,” she said.  “It was a sad little baby I seemed to see.”

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE LITTLE GODS RETURN WITH A LADY

Grizel’s clear, searching eyes, that were always asking for the truth, came back to her, and I seem to see them on me now, watching lest I shirk the end.

Thus I can make no pretence (to please you) that it was a new Tommy at last.  We have seen how he gave his life to her during those eighteen months, but he could not make himself anew.  They say we can do it, so I suppose he did not try hard enough; but God knows how hard he tried.

He went on trying.  In those first days she sometimes asked him, “Did you do it out of love, or was it pity only?” And he always said it was love.  He said it adoringly.  He told her all that love meant to him, and it meant everything that he thought Grizel would like it to mean.  When she ceased to ask this question he thought it was because he had convinced her.

They had a honeymoon by the sea.  He insisted upon it with boyish eagerness, and as they walked on the links or sat in their room he would exclaim ecstatically:  “How happy I am!  I wonder if there were ever two people quite so happy as you and I!”