"
Tommy winced and walked up and down.
"Desire to marry her gone?" asked David, savagely.
"No," Tommy said. He sat down. "You have the key to me, Gemmell," he
went on quietly. "I gave it to you. You know I am a man of sentiment
only; but you are without a scrap of it yourself, and so you will
never quite know what it is. It has its good points. We are a kindly
people. I was perhaps pluming myself on having made an heroic
proposal, and though you have made me see it just now as you see it,
as you see it I shall probably soon be putting on the same grand airs
again. Lately I discovered that the children who see me with Grizel
call me 'the Man with the Greetin' Eyes.' If I have greetin' eyes it
was real grief that gave them to me; but when I heard what I was
called it made me self-conscious, and I have tried to look still more
lugubrious ever since. It seems monstrous to you, but that, I believe,
is the kind of thing I shall always be doing. But it does not mean
that I feel no real remorse. They were greetin' eyes before I knew it,
and though I may pose grotesquely as a fine fellow for finding Grizel
a home where there is no child and can never be a child, I shall not
cease, night nor day, from tending her.
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