They returned to Thrums in a week.  They had meant to stay longer, but suddenly Tommy wanted to go back.  Yes, it was Lady Pippinworth who recalled him, but don’t think too meanly of Tommy.  It was not that he yielded to one of those fierce desires to lift the gauntlet; he had got rid of them in fair fight when her letter reached him, forwarded from Thrums.  “Did you really think your manuscript was lost?” it said.  That was what took Tommy back.  Grizel did not know the reason; he gave her another.  He thought very little about her that day.  He thought still less about Lady Pippinworth.  How could he think of anything but it?  She had it, evidently she had it; she must have stolen it from his bag.  He could not even spare time to denounce her.  It was alive—­his manuscript was alive, and every moment brought him nearer to it.  He was a miser, and soon his hands would be deep among the gold.  He was a mother whose son, mourned for dead, is knocking at the door.  He was a swain, and his beloved’s arms were outstretched to him.  Who said that Tommy could not love?

The ecstasies that came over him and would not let him sit still made Grizel wonder.  “Is it a book?” she asked; and he said it was a book—­such a book, Grizel!  When he started for the castle next morning, she thought he wanted to be alone to think of the book.  “Of it and you,” he said; and having started, he came back to kiss her again; he never forgot to have an impulse to do that.  But all the way to the Spittal it was of his book he thought, it was his book he was kissing.  His heart sang within him, and the songs were sonnets to his beloved.  To be worthy of his beautiful manuscript—­he prayed for that as lovers do; that his love should be his, his alone, was as wondrous to him as to any of them.

But we are not noticing what proved to be the chief thing.  Though there was some sun, the air was shrewd, and he was wearing the old doctor’s coat.  Should you have taken it with you, Tommy?  It loved Grizel, for it was a bit of him; and what, think you, would the old doctor have cared for your manuscript had he known that you were gone out to meet that woman?  It was cruel, no, not cruel, but thoughtless, to wear the old doctor’s coat.

He found no one at the Spittal.  The men were out shooting, and the ladies had followed to lunch with them on the moors.  He came upon them, a gay party, in the hollow of a hill where was a spring suddenly converted into a wine-cellar; and soon the men, if not the ladies, were surprised to find that Tommy could be the gayest of them all.  He was in hilarious spirits, and had a gallantly forgiving glance for the only one of them who knew why his spirits were hilarious.  But he would not consent to remain to dinner.  “The wretch is so hopelessly in love with his wife,” Lady Rintoul said, flinging a twig of heather at him.  It was one of the many trivial things said on that occasion and long remembered; the only person who afterwards professed her inability to remember what Tommy said to her that day, and she to him, was Lady Pippinworth.  “And yet you walked back to the castle with him,” they reminded her.