declared, "is what I have been trying to prove."

"It will be a weary task, Grizel."

"I won't weary at it," she said, smiling.

Her cheerfulness was a continual surprise to him. "You bear up
wonderfully well yourself," he sometimes said to her, almost
reproachfully, and she never replied that, perhaps, that was one of
her ways of trying to help him.

She is not so heartbroken, after all, you may be saying, and I had
promised to break her heart. But, honestly, I don't know how to do it
more thoroughly, and you must remember that we have not seen her alone
yet.

She tried to be very little alone. She helped David in his work more
than ever; not a person, for instance, managed to escape the bath
because Grizel's heart was broken. You could never say that she was
alone when her needle was going, and the linen became sheets and the
like, in what was probably record time. Yet they could have been sewn
more quickly; for at times the needle stopped and she did not know it.
Once a bedridden old woman, with whom she had been sitting up, lay
watching her instead of sleeping, and finally said: "What makes you
sit staring at a cauld fire, and speaking to yourself?" And there was
a strange day when she had been too long in the Den. When she started
for home she went in the direction of Double Dykes, her old home,
instead.

She could bear everything except doubt. She had told him so, when he
wondered at her calmness; she often said it to herself. She could
tread any path, however drearily it stretched before her, so long as
she knew whither it led, but there could be no more doubt. Oh, he must
never again disturb her mind with hope! How clearly she showed him
that, and yet they had perhaps no more than parted when it seemed
impossible to bear for the next hour the desolation she was sentenced
to for life. She lay quivering and tossing on the hearth-rug of the
parlour, beating it with her fists, rocking her arms, and calling to
him to give her doubt again, that she might get through the days.

"Let me doubt again!" Here was Grizel starting to beg it of him. More
than once she got half-way to Aaron's house before she could turn; but
she always did turn, with the words unspoken; never did Tommy hear her
say them, but always that she was tranquil now. Was it pride that
supported her in the trying hour? Oh, no, it was not pride. That is an
old garment, which once became Grizel well, but she does not wear it
now; she takes it out