Elspeth adored him for it, but Grizel would have stamped had she known.  He had that comfort.

The second letter he never posted.  It was written a few months before he became a celebrity, and had very fine things indeed in it, for old Dr. McQueen, Grizel’s dear friend, had just died at his post, and it was a letter of condolence.  While Tommy wrote it he was in a quiver of genuine emotion, as he was very pleased to feel, and it had a specially satisfying bit about death, and the world never being the same again.  He knew it was good, but he did not send it to her, for no reason I can discover save that postscripts jarred on him.

CHAPTER IV

GRIZEL OF THE CROOKED SMILE

To expose Tommy for what he was, to appear to be scrupulously fair to him so that I might really damage him the more, that is what I set out to do in this book, and always when he seemed to be finding a way of getting round me (as I had a secret dread he might do) I was to remember Grizel and be obdurate.  But if I have so far got past some of his virtues without even mentioning them (and I have), I know how many opportunities for discrediting him have been missed, and that would not greatly matter, there are so many more to come, if Grizel were on my side.  But she is not; throughout those first chapters a voice has been crying to me, “Take care; if you hurt him you will hurt me”; and I know it to be the voice of Grizel, and I seem to see her, rocking her arms as she used to rock them when excited in the days of her innocent childhood.  “Don’t, don’t, don’t!” she cried at every cruel word I gave him, and she, to whom it was ever such agony to weep, dropped a tear upon each word, so that they were obliterated; and “Surely I knew him best,” she said, “and I always loved him”; and she stood there defending him, with her hand on her heart to conceal the gaping wound that Tommy had made.

Well, if Grizel had always loved him there was surely something fine and rare about Tommy.  But what was it, Grizel?  Why did you always love him, you who saw into him so well and demanded so much of men?  When I ask that question the spirit that hovers round my desk to protect Tommy from me rocks her arms mournfully, as if she did not know the answer; it is only when I seem to see her as she so often was in life, before she got that wound and after, bending over some little child and looking up radiant, that I think I suddenly know why she always loved Tommy.  It was because he had such need of her.

I don’t know whether you remember, but there were once some children who played at Jacobites in the Thrums Den under Tommy’s leadership.  Elspeth, of course, was one of them, and there were Corp Shiach, and Gavinia, and lastly, there was Grizel.  Had Tommy’s parents been alive she would not have been allowed to join, for she was a painted lady’s child; but Tommy insisted on having her, and Grizel