I wonder how he was so sure. Do we know all
that Grizel had to fight?
* * * * *
They spoke much during those days of the coming parting, and she
always said that she could bear it if she saw him go away more of a
man than he had come.
"Then anything I have suffered or may suffer," she told him, "will
have been done to help you, and perhaps in time that will make me
proud of my poor little love-story. It would be rather pitiful, would
it not, if I have gone through so much for no end at all?"
She spoke, he said, almost reproachfully, as if she thought he might
go away on his wings, after all.
"We can't be sure," she murmured, she was so eager to make him
watchful.
"Yes," he said, humbly but firmly, "I may be a scoundrel, Grizel, I am
a scoundrel, but one thing you may be sure of, I am done with
sentiment." But even as he said it, even as he felt that he could tear
himself asunder for being untrue to Grizel, a bird was singing at his
heart because he was free again, free to go out into the world and
play as if it were but a larger den. Ah, if only Tommy could always
have remained a boy!
Elspeth's marriage day came round, and I should like to linger in it,
and show you Elspeth in her wedding-gown, and Tommy standing behind to
catch her if she fainted, and Ailie weeping, and Aaron Latta rubbing
his gleeful hands, and a smiling bridesmaid who had once thought she
might be a bride.
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