hat Tommy was doing all this for Grizel and pretending to
her that it was for himself? He was passionately desirous of making
amends, and he was to do it in the most generous way. Perhaps he
believed when he seemed to enter her room saying, "Grizel, I have come
back," that she loved him still; perhaps he knew that he did not love
in the way he said; perhaps he saw a remorseful man making splendid
atonement: but never should she know these things; tenderly as he had
begun he would go on to the end. Here at last is a Tommy worth looking
at, and he looked.

Yet as he drew near Thrums, after almost exactly two days of
continuous travel, many a shiver went down his back, for he could not
be sure that he should find Grizel here; he sometimes seemed to see
her lying ill at some wayside station in Switzerland, in France;
everything that could have happened to her he conceived, and he moved
restlessly in the carriage. His mouth went dry.

"Has she come back?"

The train had stopped for the taking of tickets, and his tremulous
question checked the joy of Corp at sight of him.

"She's back," Corp answered in an excited whisper; and oh, the relief
to Tommy! "She came back by the afternoon train; but I had scarce a
word wi' her, she was so awid to be hame. 'I am going home,' she
cried, and hurried away up the brae. Ay, and there's one queer thing."

"What?"

"Her luggage wasna in the van."

Tommy could smile at that. "But what sent her," he asked eagerly, "on
that journey?"

Corp told him the little he knew. "But nobody kens except me and
Gavinia," he said. We pretend she gaed to London to see her father. We
said he had wrote to her, wanting her to go to him. Gavinia said it
would never do to let folk ken she had gaen to see you, and even
Elspeth doesna ken."

"Is Elspeth back?"

"They came back yesterday."

Did David know the truth from Grizel? was what Tommy was asking
himself now as he strode up the brae. But again he was in luck, for
when he had explained away his abrupt return to Elspeth, and been
joyfully welcomed by her, she told him that her husband had been in
one of the glens all day. "He does not know that Grizel has come
back," she said. "Oh," she exclaimed, "but you don't even know that
she has been away! Grizel has been in London."

"Corp told me," said Tommy.

"And did he tell you why she had gone?"

"Yes."

"She came back an hour or two ago. Maggy Ann saw her go past. Fancy
her seeing her father