“Enough for all our wants.” (He was writing magazine papers only.)

“The public will forget you.”

“They have forgotten me.”

David was openly sorry for him now.  “If only your manuscript had been saved!”

“Yes; I never thought the little gods would treat me so scurvily as that.”

“Who?”

“Did I never tell you of my little gods?  I so often emerged triumphant from my troubles, and so undeservedly, that I thought I was especially looked after by certain tricky spirits in return for the entertainment I gave them.  My little gods, I called them, and we had quite a bowing acquaintance.  But you see at the critical moment they flew away laughing.”

He always knew that the lost manuscript was his great work.  “My seventh wave,” he called it; “and though all the conditions were favourable,” he said, “I know that I could run to nothing more than little waves at present.  As for rewriting that book, I can’t; I have tried.”

Yet he was not asking for commiseration.  “Tell Elspeth not to worry about me.  If I have no big ideas just now, I have some very passable little ones, and one in particular that—­” He drew a great breath.  “If only Grizel were better,” that breath said, “I think Tommy Sandys could find a way of making the public remember him again.”

So David interpreted it, and though he had been about to say, “How changed you are!” he did not say it.

And Tommy, who had been keeping an eye on her all this time, returned to Grizel.  As she had been through that long year, so she was during the first half of the next; and day by day and night by night he tended her, and still the same scenes were enacted in infinite variety, and still he would not give in.  Everything seemed to change with the seasons, except Grizel, and Tommy’s devotion to her.

Yet you know that she recovered, ever afterwards to be herself again; and though it seemed to come in the end as suddenly as the sight may be restored by the removal of a bandage, I suppose it had been going on all the time, and that her reason was given back to her on the day she had strength to make use of it.  Tommy was the instrument of her recovery.  He had fought against her slipping backward so that she could not do it; it was as if he had built a wall behind her, and in time her mind accepted that wall as impregnable and took a forward movement.  And with every step she took he pushed the wall after her, so that still if she moved it must be forward.  Thus Grizel progressed imperceptibly as along a dark corridor towards the door that shut out the light, and on a day in early spring the door fell.

Many of them had cried for a shock as her only chance.  But it came most quietly.  She had lain down on the sofa that afternoon to rest, and when she woke she was Grizel again.  At first she was not surprised to find herself in that room, nor to see that man nodding and smiling reassuringly; they had come out of the long dream with her, to make the awakening less abrupt.