When next she came to see him!  That was while his ankle still nailed him to the chair, a fortnight or so during which Tommy was at his best, sending gracious messages by Elspeth to the many who called to inquire, and writing hard at his new work, pad on knee, so like a brave soul whom no unmerited misfortune could subdue that it would have done you good merely to peep at him through the window.  Grizel came several times, and the three talked very ordinary things, mostly reminiscences; she was as much a plain-spoken princess as ever, but often he found her eyes fixed on him wistfully, and he knew what they were saying; they spoke so eloquently that he was a little nervous lest Elspeth should notice.  It was delicious to Tommy to feel that there was this little unspoken something between him and Grizel; he half regretted that the time could not be far distant when she must put it into words—­as soon, say, as Elspeth left the room; an exquisite moment, no doubt, but it would be the plucking of the flower.

Don’t think that Tommy conceived Grizel to be in love with him.  On my sacred honour, that would have horrified him.

Curiously enough, she did not take the first opportunity Elspeth gave her of telling him in words how much she admired his brave confession.  She was so honest that he expected her to begin the moment the door closed, and now that the artistic time had come for it, he wanted it; but no.  He was not hurt, but he wondered at her shyness, and cast about for the reason.  He cast far back into the past, and caught a little girl who had worn this same wistful face when she admired him most.  He compared those two faces of the anxious girl and the serene woman, and in the wistfulness that sometimes lay on them both they looked alike.  Was it possible that the fear of him which the years had driven out of the girl still lived a ghost’s life to haunt the woman?

At once he overflowed with pity.  As a boy he had exulted in Grizel’s fear of him; as a man he could feel only the pain of it.  There was no one, he thought, less to be dreaded of a woman than he; oh, so sure Tommy was of that!  And he must lay this ghost; he gave his whole heart to the laying of it.

Few men, and never a woman, could do a fine thing so delicately as he; but of course it included a divergence from the truth, for to Tommy afloat on a generous scheme the truth was a buoy marking sunken rocks.  She had feared him in her childhood, as he knew well; he therefore proceeded to prove to her that she had never feared him.  She had thought him masterful, and all his reminiscences now went to show that it was she who had been the masterful one.

“You must often laugh now,” he said, “to remember how I feared you.  The memory of it makes me afraid of you still.  I assure you, I joukit back, as Corp would say, that day I saw you in church.  It was the instinct of self-preservation.  ’Here comes Grizel to lord it over me again,’ I heard something inside me saying.  You called me masterful, and yet I had always to give in to you.  That shows what a gentle, yielding girl you were, and what a masterful character I was!”