nt
away puckering his brows, some of the old doctor's sayings about her
ringing loud in his ears.

One of them was: "Things will be far wrong with Grizel when she is
able to sit idle with her hands in her lap."

Another: "She is almost pitifully straightforward, man. Everything
that is in Grizel must out. She can hide nothing."

Yet how cunningly she had concealed what was in her hands. Cunning
applied to Grizel! David shuddered. He thought of Tommy, and shut his
mouth tight. He could do this easily. Tommy could not do it without
feeling breathless. They were types of two kinds of men.

David also remembered a promise he had given McQueen, and wondered, as
he had wondered a good deal of late, whether the time had come to keep
it.

But Grizel sat on with her unopened letter. She was to meet Tommy
presently on the croquet lawn of the Dovecot, when Ailie was to play
Mr. James (the champion), and she decided that she must wait till
then. She would know what sort of letter it was the moment she saw his
face. And then! She pressed her hands together.

Oh, how base of her to doubt him! She said it to herself then and
often afterwards. She looked mournfully in her mother's long mirror at
this disloyal Grizel, as if the capacity to doubt him was the saddest
of all the changes that had come to her. He had been so true
yesterday; oh, how could she tremble to-day? Beautiful yesterday! but
yesterday may seem so long ago. How little a time had passed between
the moment when she was greeting him joyously in Caddam Wood and that
cry of the heart, "How could you hurt your Grizel so!" No, she could
not open her letter. She could kiss it, but she could not open it.

Foolish fears! for before she had shaken hands with Tommy in Mrs.
McLean's garden she knew he loved her still, and that the letter
proved it. She was properly punished, yet surely in excess, for when
she might have been reading her first love-letter, she had to join in
discussions with various ladies about Berlin wool and the like, and to
applaud the prowess of Mr. James with the loathly croquet mallet. It
seemed quite a long time before Tommy could get a private word with
her. Then he began about the letter at once.

"You are not angry with me for writing it?" he asked anxiously. "I
should not have done it; I had no right: but such a desire to do it
came over me, I had to; it was such a glory to me to say in writing
what you are to me."

She smiled happily. Oh, ex