Grizel smiled at him.

“I mind,” Corp went on, “how when you was little you couldna see a bairn without rocking your arms in a waeful kind o’ a way, and we could never thole the meaning o’t.  It just comes over me this minute as it meant that when you was a woman you would like terrible to hae bairns o’ your ain, and you doubted you never should.”

She raised her hand to stop him.  “You see, I was not meant to have them, Corp,” she said.  “I think that when women are too fond of other people’s babies they never have any of their own.”

But Corp shook his head.  “I dinna understand it,” he told her, “but I’m sure you was meant to hae them.  Something’s gane wrang.”

She was still smiling at him, but her eyes were wet now, and she drew him on to talk of the days when Tommy was a boy.  It was sweet to Grizel to listen while Elspeth and David told her of the thousand things Tommy had done for her when she was ill, but she loved best to talk with Corp of the time when they were all children in the Den.  The days of childhood are the best.

She lived so long after Tommy that she was almost a middle-aged woman when she died.

And so the Painted Lady’s daughter has found a way of making Tommy’s life the story of a perfect lover, after all.  The little girl she had been comes stealing back into the book and rocks her arms joyfully, and we see Grizel’s crooked smile for the last time.