e."

"Did he say he telled me her name?"

"He did."

"Well, then, I've fair forgot it."

Instead of boxing his ears she begged him to reflect. Result of
reflection, that if the name had been mentioned to Corp, which he
doubted, it began with M.

Was it Mary?

That was the name.

Or was it Martha?

It had a taste of Martha about it.

It was not Margaret?

It might have been Margaret.

Or Matilda?

It was fell like Matilda.

And so on. "But wi' a' your wheedling," Corp reminded his wife,
bantering her from aloft, "you couldna get a scraping out o' me till I
was free to speak."

He thought it a good opportunity for showing Gavinia her place once
and for all. "In small matters," he said, "I gie you your ain way, for
though you may be wrang, thinks I to mysel', 'She's but a woman'; but
in important things, Gavinia, if I humoured you I would spoil you, so
let this be a telling to you that there's no diddling a determined
man"; to which she replied by informing the baby that he had a father
to be proud of.

A father to be proud of! They were the words heard by Grizel as she
entered. She also saw Gavinia looking admiringly at her man, and in
that doleful moment she thought she understood all. It was Corp who
had done it, and Tommy had been the looker-on. He had sought to keep
the incident secret because, though he was in it, the glory had been
won by another (oh, how base!), and now, profiting by the boy's
mistake, he was swaggering in that other's clothes (oh, baser still!).
Everything was revealed to her in a flash, and she stooped over the
baby to hide a sudden tear. She did not want to hear any more.

The baby cried. Babies are aware that they can't do very much; but all
of them who knew Grizel were almost contemptuously confident of their
power over her, and when this one saw (they are very sharp) that in
his presence she could actually think of something else, he was so
hurt that he cried.

Was she to be blamed for thinking so meanly of Tommy? You can blame
her with that tear in her eye if you choose; but I can think only of
the gladness that came afterwards when she knew she had been unjust to
him. "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" the bird sang to its Creator
when the sun came out after rain, and it was Grizel's song as she
listened to Corp's story of heroic Tommy. There was no room in her
exultant heart for remorse. It would have shown littleness to be able
to think of herself at all when she