nt
warmth, and often desisted, to press it to her bosom, the heat seemed
to come so reluctantly from the fire. This idea that his fate was
bound up with that of the plant took strange possession of the once
practical Grizel; it was as if some of Tommy's nature had passed into
her to help her break the terrible monotony of the days.

And from that time there was no ailing child more passionately tended
than the plant, and as spring advanced it began once more to put forth
new leaves.

And Grizel also seemed glorified again. She was her old self. Dark
shapes still lingered for her in the Den, but she avoided them, and if
they tried to enter into her, she struggled with them and cast them
out. As she saw herself able to fight and win once more, her pride
returned to her, and one day she could ask David, joyously, to give
her a present of the old doctor's chair. And she could kneel by its
side and say to it, "You can watch me always; I am just as I used to
be."

Seeing her once more the incarnation of vigor and content, singing
gaily to his child, and as eager to be at her duties betimes as a
morning in May, Corp grunted with delight, and was a hero for not
telling her that it was he who had passed Tommy the word. For, of
course, Tommy had done it all.

"Somebody has found a wy, Grizel!" he would say, chuckling, and she
smiled an agreement.

"And yet," says he, puzzled, "I've watched, and you hinna haen a
letter frae him. It defies the face o' clay to find out how he has
managed it. Oh, the crittur! Ay, I suppose you dinna want to tell me
what it is that has lichted you up again?"

She could not tell him, for it was a compact she had made with one who
did not sign it. "I shall cease to be bitter and despairing and
wicked, and try every moment of my life to be good and do good, so
long as my plant flourishes; but if it withers, then I shall go to
him--I don't care what happens; I shall go to him."

It was the middle of June when she first noticed that the plant was
beginning to droop.

CHAPTER XXVII

GRIZEL'S JOURNEY

Nothing could have been less expected. In the beginning of May its
leaves had lost something of their greenness. The plant seemed to be
hesitating, but she coaxed it over the hill, and since then it had
scarcely needed her hand; almost light-headedly it hurried into its
summer clothes, and new buds broke out on it, like smiles, at the
fascinating thought that there was to be a to-morrow.