" He drew a great breath. "If
only Grizel were better," that breath said, "I think Tommy Sandys
could find a way of making the public remember him again."

So David interpreted it, and though he had been about to say, "How
changed you are!" he did not say it.

And Tommy, who had been keeping an eye on her all this time, returned
to Grizel. As she had been through that long year, so she was during
the first half of the next; and day by day and night by night he
tended her, and still the same scenes were enacted in infinite
variety, and still he would not give in. Everything seemed to change
with the seasons, except Grizel, and Tommy's devotion to her.

Yet you know that she recovered, ever afterwards to be herself again;
and though it seemed to come in the end as suddenly as the sight may
be restored by the removal of a bandage, I suppose it had been going
on all the time, and that her reason was given back to her on the day
she had strength to make use of it. Tommy was the instrument of her
recovery. He had fought against her slipping backward so that she
could not do it; it was as if he had built a wall behind her, and in
time her mind accepted that wall as impregnable and took a forward
movement. And with every step she took he pushed the wall after her,
so that still if she moved it must be forward. Thus Grizel progressed
imperceptibly as along a dark corridor towards the door that shut out
the light, and on a day in early spring the door fell.

Many of them had cried for a shock as her only chance. But it came
most quietly. She had lain down on the sofa that afternoon to rest,
and when she woke she was Grizel again. At first she was not surprised
to find herself in that room, nor to see that man nodding and smiling
reassuringly; they had come out of the long dream with her, to make
the awakening less abrupt.

He did not know what had happened. When he knew, a terror that this
could not last seized him. He was concealing it while he answered her
puzzled questions. All the time he was telling her how they came to be
there, he was watching in agony for the change.

She remembered everything up to her return to Thrums; then she walked
into a mist.

"The truth," she begged of him, when he would have led her off by
pretending that she had been ill only. Surely it was the real Grizel
who begged for the truth. She took his hand and held it when he told
her of their marriage. She cried softly, because she feared that