o tell you, do I? And you
are not afraid that I shall corrupt you, are you? And you don't think it
a pity I didn't die when I was a tiny baby, do you? Some people think
so, I heard them say it."

"What would have become of me?" was all he dared answer in words, but he
drew her to him again, and when she asked if it was true, as she had
heard some woman say, that in some matters men were all alike, and did
what that one man had done to her mamma, he could reply solemnly, "No,
it is not true; it's a lie that has done more harm than any war in any
century."

She sat on his knee, telling him many things that had come recently to
her knowledge but were not so new to him. The fall of woman was the
subject, a strange topic for a girl of thirteen and a man of sixty. They
don't become wicked in a moment, he learned; if they are good to begin
with, it takes quite a long time to make them bad. Her mamma was good to
begin with. "I know she was good, because when she thought she was the
girl she used to be, she looked sweet and said lovely things." The way
the men do is this, they put evil thoughts into the woman's head, and
say them often to her, till she gets accustomed to them, and thinks they
cannot be bad when the man she loves likes them, and it is called
corrupting the mind.

"And then a baby comes to them," Grizel said softly, "and it is called a
child of shame. I am a child of shame."

He made no reply, so she looked up, and his face was very old and sad.
"I am sorry too," she whispered, but still he said nothing, and then she
put her fingers on his eyes to discover if they were wet, and they were
wet. And so Grizel knew that there was someone who loved her at last.

The mirror was the only article of value that Grizel took with her to
her new home; everything else was rouped at the door of Double Dykes;
Tommy, who should have been at his books, acting as auctioneer's clerk
for sixpence. There are houses in Thrums where you may still be told who
got the bed and who the rocking-chair, and how Nether Drumgley's wife
dared him to come home without the spinet; but it is not by the sales
that the roup is best remembered. Curiosity took many persons into
Double Dykes that day, and in the room that had never been furnished
they saw a mournful stack of empty brandy bottles, piled there by the
auctioneer who had found them in every corner, beneath the bed, in
presses, in boxes, whither they had been thrust by Grizel's mamma, as