Admire!  Grizel could scarce believe that this gift was for her.  “You don’t mean that you really like me?” she faltered, but she felt sure all the time that he did, and she cried, “Oh, but why, oh, how can you!”

“For one reason,” he said, “because you are so good.”

“Good!  Oh! oh! oh!” She clapped her hands joyously.

“And for another—­because you are so brave.”

“But I am not really brave,” she said anxiously, yet resolved to hide nothing, “I only pretend to be brave, I am often frightened, but I just don’t let on.”

That, he told her, is the highest form of bravery, but Grizel was very, very tired of being brave, and she insisted impetuously, “I don’t want to be brave, I want to be afraid, like other girls.”

“Ay, it’s your right, you little woman,” he answered, tenderly, and then again he became mysterious.  He kicked off his shoes to show her that he was wearing socks that did not match.  “I just pull on the first that come to hand,” he said recklessly.

“Oh!” cried Grizel.

On his dusty book-shelves he wrote, with his finger, “Not dusted since the year One.”

“Oh! oh!” she cried.

He put his fingers through his gray, untidy hair.  “That’s the only comb I have that is at hand when I want it,” he went on, regardless of her agony.

“All the stud-holes in my shirts,” he said, “are now so frayed and large that the studs fall out, and I find them in my socks at night.”

Oh! oh! he was killing her, he was, but what cared he?  “Look at my clothes,” said the cruel man, “I read when I’m eating, and I spill so much gravy that—­that we boil my waistcoat once a month, and make soup of it!”

To Grizel this was the most tragic picture ever drawn by man, and he saw that it was time to desist.  “And it’s all,” he said, looking at her sadly, “it’s all because I am a lonely old bachelor with no womankind to look after him, no little girl to brighten him when he comes home dog-tired, no one to care whether his socks are in holes and his comb behind the wash-stand, no soft hand to soothe his brow when it aches, no one to work for, no one to love, many a one to close the old bachelor’s eyes when he dies, but none to drop a tear for him, no one to—­”

“Oh! oh! oh!  That is just like me.  Oh! oh!” cried Grizel, and he pulled her closer to him, saying, “The more reason we should join thegither; Grizel, if you don’t take pity on me, and come and bide with me and be my little housekeeper, the Lord Almighty only knows what is to become of the old doctor.”

At this she broke away from him, and stood far back pressing her arms to her sides, and she cried, “It is not out of charity you ask me, is it?” and then she went a little nearer.  “You would not say it if it wasn’t true, would you?”

“No, my dawtie, it’s true,” he told her, and if he had been pitying himself a little, there was an end of that now.