e repeated beseechingly.

"Wait for me here, Corp."

"I would rather come wi' you."

"Wait here!" Tommy said almost fiercely, and he went on alone to that
little window. It had needed an effort to make him look in when he was
here before, and it needed a bigger effort now. But he looked.

What light there was came from the fire, and whether she had gathered
the logs or found them in the room no one ever knew. A vagrant stated
afterwards that he had been in the house some days before and left his
match-box in it.

By this fire Grizel was crouching. She was comparatively tidy and neat
again; the dust was gone from her boots, even. How she had managed to
do it no one knows, but you remember how she loved to be neat. Her
hands were extended to the blaze, and she was busy talking to herself.

His hand struck the window heavily, and she looked up and saw him. She
nodded, and put her finger to her lips as a sign that he must be
cautious. She had often, in the long ago, seen her mother signing thus
to an imaginary face at the window--the face of the man who never
came.

Tommy went into the house, and she was so pleased to see him that she
quite simpered. He put his arms round her, and she lay there with a
little giggle of contentment. She was in a plot of heat.

"Grizel! Oh, my God!" he said, "why do you look at me in that way?"

She passed her hand across her eyes, like one trying to think.

"I woke up," she said at last. Corp appeared at the window now, and
she pointed to him in terror. Thus had she seen her mother point, in
the long ago, at faces that came there to frighten her.

"Grizel," Tommy entreated her, "you know who I am, don't you?"

She said his name at once, but her eyes were on the window. "They want
to take me away," she whispered.

"But you must come away, Grizel. You must come home."

"This is home," she said. "It is sweet."

After much coaxing, he prevailed upon her to leave. With his arm round
her, and a terrible woe on his face, he took her to the doctor's
house. She had her hands over her ears all the way. She thought the
white river and the mountains and the villages and the crack of whips
were marching with her still.

CHAPTER XXXI

"THE MAN WITH THE GREETIN' EYES"

For many days she lay in a fever at the doctor's house, seeming
sometimes to know where she was, but more often not, and night after
night a man with a drawn face sat watching her. They entreated, they
forced hi