“It was very wrong of you to keep it,” Grizel answered, “but I can’t take it to him, for I see now that his reason for wanting me not to come here was to prevent my hearing about it.  I am sorry you told me.  Corp must take it back.”  But when she saw it being crushed in Corp’s rough hand, a pity for the helpless glove came over her.  She said:  “After all, I do know about it, so I can’t pretend to him that I don’t.  I will give it to him, Corp”; and she put the little package in her pocket with a brave smile.

Do you think the radiance had gone from her face now?  Do you think the joy that had been lit in her heart was dead?  Oh, no, no!  Grizel had never asked that Tommy should love her; she had asked only that he should be a fine man.  She did not ask it for herself, only for him.  She could not think of herself now, only of him.  She did not think she loved him.  She thought a woman should not love any man until she knew he wanted her to love him.

But if Tommy had wanted it she would have been very glad.  She knew, oh, she knew so well, that she could have helped him best.  Many a noble woman has known it as she stood aside.

In the meantime Tommy had gone home in several states of mind—­reckless, humble, sentimental, most practical, defiant, apprehensive.  At one moment he was crying, “Now, Grizel, now, when it is too late, you will see what you have lost.”  At the next he quaked and implored the gods to help him out of his predicament.  It was apprehension that, on the whole, played most of the tunes, for he was by no means sure that Grizel would not look upon the affair of the glove as an offer of his hand, and accept him.  They would show her the glove, and she would, of course, know it to be her own.  “Give her this and tell her it never left my heart.”  The words thumped within him now.  How was Grizel to understand that he had meant nothing in particular by them?

I wonder if you misread him so utterly as to believe that he thought himself something of a prize?  That is a vulgar way of looking at things of which our fastidious Tommy was incapable.  As much as Grizel herself, he loathed the notion that women have a thirsty eye on man; when he saw them cheapening themselves before the sex that should hold them beyond price, he turned his head and would not let his mind dwell on the subject.  He was a sort of gentleman, was Tommy.  And he knew Grizel so well that had all the other women in the world been of this kind, it would not have persuaded him that there was a drop of such blood in her.  Then, if he feared that she was willing to be his, it must have been because he thought she loved him?  Not a bit of it.  As already stated, he thought he had abundant reason to think otherwise.  It was remorse that he feared might bring her to his feet, the discovery that while she had been gibing at him he had been a heroic figure, suffering in silence, eating his heart for love of her.  Undoubtedly that was how Grizel must see things now; he must seem to her to be an angel rather than a mere man; and in sheer remorse she might cry, “I am yours!” Vain though Tommy was, the picture gave him not a moment’s pleasure.  Alarm was what he felt.