She had known him intimately for nearly six years now, ever since he became the old doctor’s assistant on the day when, in the tail of some others, he came to Thrums, aged twenty-one, to apply for the post.  Grizel had even helped to choose him; she had a quaint recollection of his being submitted to her by McQueen, who told her to look him over and say whether he would do—­an odd position in which to place a fourteen-year-old girl, but Grizel had taken it most seriously, and, indeed, of the two men only Gemmell dared to laugh.

“You should not laugh when it is so important,” she said gravely; and he stood abashed, although I believe he chuckled again when he retired to his room for the night.  She was in that room next morning as soon as he had left it, to smell the curtains (he smoked), and see whether he folded his things up neatly and used both the brush and the comb, but did not use pomade, and slept with his window open, and really took a bath instead of merely pouring the water into it and laying the sponge on top (oh, she knew them!)—­and her decision, after some days, was that, though far from perfect, he would do, if he loved her dear darling doctor sufficiently.  By this time David was openly afraid of her, which Grizel noticed, and took to be, in the circumstances, a satisfactory sign.

She watched him narrowly for the next year, and after that she ceased to watch him at all.  She was like a congregation become so sure of its minister’s soundness that it can risk going to sleep.  To begin with, he was quite incapable of pretending to be anything he was not.  Oh, how unlike a boy she had once known!  His manner, like his voice, was quiet.  Being himself the son of a doctor, he did not dodder through life amazed at the splendid eminence he had climbed to, which is the weakness of Scottish students when they graduate, and often for fifty years afterwards.  How sweet he was to Dr. McQueen, never forgetting the respect due to gray hairs, never hinting that the new school of medicine knew many things that were hidden from the old, and always having the sense to support McQueen when she was scolding him for his numerous naughty ways.  When the old doctor came home now on cold nights it was not with his cravat in his pocket, and Grizel knew very well who had put it round his neck.  McQueen never had the humiliation, so distressing to an old doctor, of being asked by patients to send his assistant instead of coming himself.  He thought they preferred him, and twitted David about it; but Grizel knew that David had sometimes to order them to prefer the old man.  She knew that when he said good-night and was supposed to have gone to his lodgings, he was probably off to some poor house where, if not he, a tired woman must sit the long night through by a sufferer’s bedside, and she realized with joy that his chief reason for not speaking of such things was that he took them as part of his natural work and never even knew that he was kind.  He was not specially skilful, he had taken no honours either at school or college, and he considered himself to be a very ordinary young man.  If you had said that on this point you disagreed with him, his manner probably would have implied that he thought you a bit of an ass.