to merit it; and all day and every day she kept her promise. There
could not have been a brighter or more energetic wife than Grizel. The
amount of work she found to do in that small house which his devotion
had made so dear to her that she could not leave it! Her gaiety! Her
masterful airs when he wanted something that was not good for him! The
artfulness with which she sought to help him in various matters
without his knowing! Her satisfaction when he caught her at it, as
clever Tommy was constantly doing! "What a success it has turned out!"
David would say delightedly to himself; and Grizel was almost as
jubilant because it was so far from being a failure. It was only
sometimes in the night that she lay very still, with little wells of
water on her eyes, and through them saw one--the dream of woman--whom
she feared could never be hers. That boy Tommy never knew why she did
not want to have a child. He thought that for the present she was
afraid; but the reason was that she believed it would be wicked when
he did not love her as she loved him. She could not be sure--she had
to think it all out for herself. With little wells of sadness on her
eyes, she prayed in the still night to God to tell her; but she could
never hear His answer.

She no longer sought to teach Tommy how he should write. That quaint
desire was abandoned from the day when she learned that she had
destroyed his greatest work. She had not destroyed it, as we shall
see; but she presumed she had, as Tommy thought so. He had tried to
conceal this from her to save her pain, but she had found it out, and
it seemed to Grizel, grown distrustful of herself, that the man who
could bear such a loss as he had borne it was best left to write as he
chose.

"It was not that I did not love your books," she said, "but that I
loved you more, and I thought they did you harm."

"In the days when I had wings," he answered, and she smiled. "Any
feathers left, do you think, Grizel?" he asked jocularly, and turned
his shoulders to her for examination.

"A great many, sir," she said, "and I am glad. I used to want to pull
them all out, but now I like to know that they are still there, for it
means that you remain among the facts not because you can't fly, but
because you won't."

"I still have my little fights with myself," he blurted out boyishly,
though it was a thing he had never meant to tell her, and Grizel
pressed his hand for telling her what she already knew so