“Yes you are!  You are coming with me.”

“I’m not!”

“Then why did you put on so many clothes?”

Tommy swithered wretchedly on one foot.  “I didna put them on to come wi’ you,” he explained, “I just put them on in case I should come wi’ you.”

“And are you not coming?”

“How can I ken?”

“But you must decide,” Grizel almost screamed.

“I needna,” he stammered, “till we’re at Tilliedrum.  Let’s speak about some other thing.”

She rocked her arms, crying, “It is so easy to make up one’s mind.”

“It’s easy to you that has just one mind,” he retorted with spirit, “but if you had as many minds as I have—!”

On they went.

CHAPTER XXXIII

THERE IS SOME ONE TO LOVE GRIZEL AT LAST

Corp was sitting on the Monypenny dyke, spitting on a candlestick and then rubbing it briskly against his orange-colored trousers.  The doctor passing in his gig, both of them streaked, till they blended, with the mud of Look-about-you road (through which you should drive winking rapidly all the way), saw him and drew up.

“Well, how is Grizel?” he asked.  He had avoided Double Dykes since the funeral, but vain had been his attempts to turn its little inmate out of his mind; there she was, against his will, and there, he now admitted to himself angrily or with a rueful sigh, she seemed likely to remain until someone gave her a home.  It was an almost ludicrous distrust of himself that kept him away from her; he feared that if he went to Double Dykes her lonely face would complete his conquest.  For oh, he was reluctant to be got the better of, as he expressed it to himself.  Maggy Ann, his maid, was the ideal woman for a bachelor’s house.  When she saw him coming she fled, guiltily concealing the hated duster; when he roared at her for announcing that dinner was ready, she left him to eat it half cold; when he spilled matches on the floor and then stepped upon them and set the rug on fire, she let him tell her that she should be more careful; she did not carry off his favorite boots to the cobbler because they were down at heel; she did not fling up her arms in horror and cry that she had brushed that coat just five minutes ago; nor did she count the treasured “dottels” on the mantelpiece to discover how many pipes he had smoked since morning; nor point out that he had stepped over the door-mat; nor line her shelves with the new Mentor; nor give him up his foot for sitting half the night with patients who could not pay—­in short, he knew the ways of the limmers, and Maggy Ann was a jewel.  But it had taken him a dozen years to bring her to this perfection, and well he knew that the curse of Eve, as he called the rage for the duster, slumbered in her rather than was extinguished.  With the volcanic Grizel in the house, Maggy Ann would once more burst into flame, and the horrified doctor looked