nd he kept it thus. Oh, wicked,
wicked!

"You would have gone to him at once, Elspeth! You! Who are you, that
talks of going to him as your right? He is not yours, I tell you; he
is mine! He is mine alone; it is I who would go to him. Who is this
woman that dares take my place by his side when he is ill!"

She rose to go to him, to drive away all others. I am sure that was
what gave her strength to rise; but she sank to the floor again, and
her passion lasted for hours. And through the night she was crying to
God that she would be brave no more. In her despair she hoped he heard
her.

Her mood had not changed when David came to see her next morning, to
admit, too, that Tommy seemed to have done an unselfish thing in
concealing his illness from them. Grizel nodded, but he thought she
was looking strangely reckless. He had a message from Elspeth. Tommy
had asked her to let him know whether the plant was flourishing.

"So you and he don't correspond now?" David said, with his old,
puzzled look.

"No," was all her answer to that. The plant, she thought, was dead;
she had not, indeed, paid much attention to it of late; but she showed
it to David, and he said it would revive if more carefully tended. He
also told her its rather pathetic history, which was new to Grizel,
and of the talk at the wedding which had led to Tommy's taking pity on
it. "Fellow-feeling, I suppose," he said lightly; "you see, they both
blossomed prematurely."

The words were forgotten by him as soon as spoken; but Grizel sat on
with them, for they were like a friend--or was it an enemy?--who had
come to tell her strange things. Yes, the doctor was right. Now she
knew why Tommy had loved this plant. Of the way in which he would sit
looking wistfully at it, almost nursing it, she had been told by
Aaron; he had himself begged her to tend it lovingly. Fellow-feeling!
The doctor was shrewder than he thought.

Well, what did it matter to her? All that day she would do nothing for
the plant, but in the middle of the night she rose and ran to it and
hugged it, and for a time she was afraid to look at it by lamplight,
lest Tommy was dead. Whether she had never been asleep that night, or
had awakened from a dream, she never knew, but she ran to the plant,
thinking it and Tommy were as one, and that they must die together. No
such thought had ever crossed his mind, but it seemed to her that she
had been told it by him, and she lit her fire to give the pla