upon as a disgrace, and where to obtain
the dearest cupboards, one of them in use as the retiring-chamber of a
rabbit-hutch, and stately clocks made in the town a hundred years ago,
and quaint old-farrant lamps and cogeys and sand-glasses that
apologized if you looked at them, and yet were as willing to be loved
again as any old lady in a mutch. You will not buy them easily now,
the people will not chuckle at you when you bid for them now. We have
become so cute in Thrums that when the fender breaks we think it may
have increased in value, and we preserve any old board lest the worms
have made it artistic. Grizel, however, was in advance of her time.
She could lay her hands on all she wanted, and she did, but it was for
Elspeth's house.

"And the table-cloths and the towels and the sheets," said Tommy.
"Nothing monstrous in my letting you give Elspeth them?"

The linen, you see, was no longer in Grizel's press.

"I could not help making them," she answered, "they were so longing to
be made. I did not mean to give them to her. I think I meant to put
them back in the press, but when they were made it was natural that
they should want to have something to do. So I gave them to Elspeth."

"With how many tears on them?"

"Not many. But with some kisses."

"All which," says Tommy, "goes to prove that I have nothing with which
to reproach myself!"

"No, I never said that," she told him. "You have to reproach yourself
with wanting me to love you."

She paused a moment to let him say, if he dared, that he had not done
that, when she would have replied instantly, "You know you did." He
could have disabused her, but it would have been cruel, and so on this
subject, as ever, he remained silent.

"But that is not what I have been trying to prove," she continued.
"You know as well as I that the cause of this unhappiness has
been--what you call your wings."

He was about to thank her for her delicacy in avoiding its real name,
when she added, "I mean your sentiment," and he laughed instead.

"I flatter myself that I no longer fly, at all events," he said. "I
know what I am at last, Grizel"

"It is flattery only," she replied with her old directness. "This
thing you are regarding with a morbid satisfaction is not you at all."

He groaned. "Which of them all is me, Grizel?" he asked gloomily.

"We shall see," she said, "when we have got the wings off."

"They will have to come off a feather at a time."

"That," she