She was not speaking aloud, for evidently Grizel, whose back was toward her, heard nothing, but her lips moved and she nodded her head and smiled and beckoned, apparently to the wall, and the childish face rapidly became vacant and foolish.  This mood passed, and now she was sitting very still, only her head moving, as she looked in apprehension and perplexity this way and that, like one who no longer knew where she was, nor who was the child by the fire.  When at last Grizel turned and observed the change, she may have sighed, but there was no fear in her face; the fear was on the face of her mother, who shrank from her in unmistakable terror and would have screamed at a harsh word or a hasty movement.  Grizel seemed to know this, for she remained where she was, and first she nodded and smiled reassuringly to her mother, and then, leaning forward, took her hand and stroked it softly and began to talk.  She had laid aside her doll, and with the act become a woman again.

The Painted Lady was soothed, but her bewildered look came and went, as if she only caught at some explanation Grizel was making, to lose it in a moment.  Yet she seemed most eager to be persuaded.  The little watchers at this queer play saw that Grizel was saying things to her which she repeated docilely and clung to and lost hold of.  Often Grizel illustrated her words by a sort of pantomime, as when she sat down on a chair and placed the doll in her lap, then sat down on her mother’s lap; and when she had done this several times Tommy took Elspeth into the field to say to her: 

“Do you no see?  She means as she is the Painted Lady’s bairn, just the same as the doll is her bairn.”

If the Painted Lady needed to be told this every minute she was daft indeed, and Elspeth could peer no longer at the eerie spectacle.  To leave Tommy, however, was equally difficult, so she crouched at his feet when he returned to the window, drawn there hastily by the sound of music.

The Painted Lady could play on the spinet beautifully, but Grizel could not play, though it was she who was trying to play now.  She was running her fingers over the notes, producing noises from them, while she swayed grotesquely on her seat and made comic faces.  Her object was to capture her mother’s mind, and she succeeded for a short time, but soon it floated away from all control, and the Painted Lady fell a-shaking violently.  Then Grizel seemed to be alarmed, and her arms rocked despairingly, but she went to her mother and took loving hold of her, and the woman clung to her child in a way pitiful to see.  She was on Grizel’s knee now, but she still shivered as if in a deadly chill, and her feet rattled on the floor, and her arms against the sides of the chair.  Grizel pinned the trembling arms with her own and twisted her legs round her mother’s, and still the Painted Lady’s tremors shook them both, so that to Tommy they were as two people wrestling.