On the day following his meeting with Lady Pippinworth came a note from Lady Rintoul inviting Grizel and him to lunch.  They had been to Rintoul once or twice before, but this time Tommy said decisively, “We sha’n’t go.”  He guessed who had prompted the invitation, though her name was not mentioned in it.

“Why not?” Grizel asked.  She was always afraid that she kept Tommy too much to herself.

“Because I object to being disturbed during the honeymoon,” he replied lightly.  Their honeymoon, you know, was never to end.  “They would separate us for hours, Grizel.  Think of it!  But, pooh! the thing is not to be thought of.  Tell her Ladyship courteously that she must be mad.”

But though he could speak thus to Grizel, there came to him tempestuous desires to be by the side of the woman who could mock him and then stand waiting.

Had she shown any fear of him all would have been well with Tommy; he could have kept away from her complacently.  But she had flung down the glove, and laughed to see him edge away from it.  He knew exactly what was in her mind.  He was too clever not to know that her one desire was to make him a miserable man; to remember how he had subdued and left her would be gall to Lady Pippinworth until she achieved the same triumph over him.  How confident she was that he could never prove the stronger of the two again!  What were all her mockings but a beckoning to him to come on?  “Take care!” said Tommy between his teeth.

And then again horror of himself would come to his rescue.  The man he had been a moment ago was vile to him, and all his thoughts were now heroic.  You may remember that he had once taken Grizel to a seaside place; they went there again.  It was Tommy’s proposal, but he did not go to flee from temptation; however his worse nature had been stirred and his vanity pricked, he was too determinedly Grizel’s to fear that in any fierce hour he might rush into danger.  He wanted Grizel to come away from the place where she always found so much to do for him, so that there might be the more for him to do for her.  And that week was as the time they had spent there before.  All that devotion which had to be planned could do for woman he did.  Grizel saw him planning it and never admitted that she saw.  In the after years it was sweet to her to recall that week and the hundred laboriously lover-like things Tommy had done in it.  She knew by this time that Tommy had never tried to make her love him, and that it was only when her love for him revealed itself in the Den that desire to save her pride made him pretend to be in love with her.  This knowledge would have been a great pain to her once, but now it had more of pleasure in it, for it showed that even in those days he had struggled a little for her.

We must hasten to the end.  Those of you who took in the newspapers a quarter of a century ago know what it was, but none of you know why he climbed the wall.