up adoringly at him.  “What a loving little soul it is!” he said, and pinched her ear, whereat she glowed with pleasure.  “But I forgot,” he would add, bantering her; “you don’t admire me.  Heigh-ho!  Grizel wants to admire me, but she can’t!” He got some satisfaction out of these flights of fancy, but it had a scurvy way of deserting him in the hour of greatest need; where was it, for instance, when the real Grizel appeared and fixed that inquiring eye on him?

He went to the Spittal several times, Elspeth with him when she cared to go; for Lady Rintoul and all the others had to learn and remember that, unless they made much of Elspeth, there could be no T. Sandys for them.  He glared at anyone, male or female, who, on being introduced to Elspeth, did not remain, obviously impressed, by her side.  “Give pleasure to Elspeth or away I go,” was written all over him.  And it had to be the right kind of pleasure, too.  The ladies must feel that she was more innocent than they, and talk accordingly.  He would walk the flower-garden with none of them until he knew for certain that the man walking it with little Elspeth was a person to be trusted.  Once he was convinced of this, however, he was very much at their service, and so little to be trusted himself that perhaps they should have had careful brothers also.  He told them, one at a time, that they were strangely unlike all the other women he had known, and held their hands a moment longer than was absolutely necessary, and then went away, leaving them and him a prey to conflicting and puzzling emotions.

Lord Rintoul, whose hair was so like his skin that in the family portraits he might have been painted in one colour, could never rid himself of the feeling that it must be a great thing to a writing chap to get a good dinner; but her ladyship always explained him away with an apologetic smile which went over his remarks like a piece of india-rubber, so that in the end he had never said anything.  She was a slight, pretty woman of nearly forty, and liked Tommy because he remembered so vividly her coming to the Spittal as a bride.  He even remembered how she had been dressed—­her white bonnet, for instance.

“For long,” Tommy said, musing, “I resented other women in white bonnets; it seemed profanation.”

“How absurd!” she told him, laughing.  “You must have been quite a small boy at the time.”

“But with a lonely boy’s passionate admiration for beautiful things,” he answered; and his gravity was a gentle rebuke to her.  “It was all a long time ago,” he said, taking both her hands in his, “but I never forget, and, dear lady, I have often wanted to thank you.”  What he was thanking her for is not precisely clear, but she knew that the artistic temperament is an odd sort of thing, and from this time Lady Rintoul liked Tommy, and even tried to find the right wife for him among the families of the surrounding clergy.  His step was sometimes quite springy when he left the Spittal; but Grizel’s shadow was always waiting for him somewhere on the way home, to take the life out of him, and after that it was again, oh, sorrowful disillusion! oh, world gone gray!  Grizel did not admire him.  T. Sandys was no longer a wonder to Grizel.  He went home to that as surely as the labourer to his evening platter.