d by her from Gavinia. She
would have liked to take away the old doctor's chair, because it was
the bit of him left behind when he died, and then for that very reason
she did not. She no longer wanted him to see her always. "I am not so
nice as I used to be, and I want to keep it from you," she said to the
chair when she kissed it good-bye.

Was Grizel not as nice as she used to be? How can I answer, who love
her the more only? There is one at least, Grizel, who will never
desert you.

Ah, but was she?

I seem again to hear the warning voice of Grizel, and this time she is
crying: "You know I was not."

She knew it so well that she could say it to herself quite calmly. She
knew that, with whatever repugnance she drove those passions away,
they would come back--yes, and for a space be welcomed back. Why does
she leave Gavinia's blue hearth this evening, and seek the solitary
Den? She has gone to summon them, and she knows it. They come thick in
the Den, for they know the place. It was there that her mother was
wont to walk with them. Have they been waiting for you in the Den,
Grizel, all this time? Have you found your mother's legacy at last?

Don't think that she sought them often. It was never when she seemed
to have anything to live for. Tommy would not write to her, and so did
not want her to write to him; but if that bowed her head, it never
made her rebel. She still had her many duties. Whatever she suffered,
so long as she could say, "I am helping him," she was in heart and
soul the Grizel of old. In his fits of remorse, which were many, he
tried to produce work that would please her. Thus, in a heroic attempt
to be practical, he wrote a political article in one of the reviews,
quite in the ordinary style, but so much worse than the average of
such things that they would never have printed it without his name. He
also contributed to a magazine a short tale,--he who could never write
tales,--and he struck all the beautiful reflections out of it, and
never referred to himself once, and the result was so imbecile that
kindly people said there must be another writer of the same name.
"Show them to Grizel," Tommy wrote to Elspeth, inclosing also some of
the animadversions of the press, and he meant Grizel to see that he
could write in his own way only. But she read those two efforts with
delight, and said to Elspeth, "Tell him I am so proud of them."

Elspeth thought it very nice of Grizel to defend the despised