you he was always irresistible
then. What is genius? It is the power to be a boy again at will. When
I think of him flinging off the years and whistling childhood back,
not to himself only, but to all who heard, distributing it among them
gaily, imperiously calling on them to dance, dance, for they are boys
and girls again until they stop--when to recall him in those wild
moods is to myself to grasp for a moment at the dear dead days that
were so much the best, I cannot wonder that Grizel loved him. I am his
slave myself; I see that all that was wrong with Tommy was that he
could not always be a boy.

"Hide there again, Grizel," he cried to her, little Tommy cried to
her, Stroke the Jacobite, her captain, cried to the Lady Griselda; and
he disappeared, and presently marched down the path with an imaginary
Elspeth by his side. "I love you both, Elspeth," he was going to say,
"and my love for the one does not make me love the other less"; but he
glanced at Grizel, and she was leaning forward to catch his words as
if this were no play, but life or death, and he knew what she longed
to hear him say, and he said it: "I love you very much, Elspeth, but
however much I love you, it would be idle to pretend that I don't love
Grizel more."

A stifled cry of joy came from a clump of whin hard by, and they were
man and woman again.

"Did you not know it, Grizel?"

"No, no; you never told me."

"I never dreamed it was necessary to tell you."

"Oh, if you knew how I have longed that it might be so, yes, and
sometimes hated Elspeth because I feared it could not be! I have tried
so hard to be content with second place. I have thought it all out,
and said to myself it was natural that Elspeth should be first."

"My tragic love," he said, "I can see you arguing in that way, but I
don't see you convincing yourself. My passionate Grizel is not the
girl to accept second place from anyone. If I know anything of her, I
know that."

To his surprise, she answered softly: "You are wrong. I wonder at it
myself, but I had made up my mind to be content with second place, and
to be grateful for it."

"I could not have believed it!" he cried.

"I could not have believed it myself," said she.

"Are you the Grizel----" he began.

"No," she said, "I have changed a little," and she looked pathetically
at him.

"It stabs me," he said, "to see you so humble."

"I am humbler than I was," she answered huskily, but she was looking
at him