“Oh, why is everyone afraid to tell me the truth!” she would cry, beating her palms in anguish.

She walked into McQueen’s surgery and said, “Could you not cut it out?” so abruptly that he wondered what she was speaking about.

“The bad thing that is in my blood,” she explained.  “Do cut it out, I sha’n’t scream.  I promise not to scream.”

He sighed and answered, “If it could be cut out, lassie, I would try to do it, though it was the most dangerous of operations.”

She looked in anguish at him.  “There are cleverer doctors than you, aren’t there?” she asked, and he was not offended.

“Ay, a hantle cleverer,” he told her, “but none so clever as that.  God help you, bairn, if you have to do it yourself some day.”

“Can I do it myself?” she cried, brightening.  “I shall do it now.  Is it done with a knife?”

“With a sharper knife than a surgeon’s,” he answered, and then, regretting he had said so much, he tried to cheer her.  But that he could not do.  “You are afraid to tell me the truth too,” she said, and when she went away he was very sorry for her, but not so sorry as she was for herself.  “When I am grown up,” she announced dolefully, to Tommy, “I shall be a bad woman, just like mamma.”

“Not if you try to be good,” he said.

“Yes, I shall.  There is something in my blood that will make me bad, and I so wanted to be good.  Oh! oh! oh!”

She told him of the things she had heard people say, but though they perplexed him almost as much as her, he was not so hopeless of learning their meaning, for here was just the kind of difficulty he liked to overcome.  “I’ll get it out o’ Blinder,” he said, with confidence in his ingenuity, “and then I’ll tell you what he says.”  But however much he might strive to do so, Tommy could never repeat anything without giving it frills and other adornment of his own making, and Grizel knew this.  “I must hear what he says myself,” she insisted.

“But he winna speak plain afore you.”

“Yes, he will, if he does not know I am there.”

The plot succeeded, though only partially, for so quick was the blind man’s sense of hearing that in the middle of the conversation he said, sharply, “Somebody’s ahint the dyke!” and he caught Grizel by the shoulder.  “It’s the Painted Lady’s lassie,” he said when she screamed, and he stormed against Tommy for taking such advantage of his blindness.  But to her he said, gently, “I daresay you egged him on to this, meaning well, but you maun forget most of what I’ve said, especially about being in the blood.  I spoke in haste, it doesna apply to the like of you.”

“Yes, it does,” replied Grizel, and all that had been revealed to her she carried hot to the surgery, Tommy stopping at the door in as great perturbation as herself.  “I know what being in the blood is now,” she said, tragically, to McQueen, “there is something about it in the Bible.  I am the child of evil passions, and that means that I was born with wickedness in my blood.  It is lying sleeping in me just now because I am only thirteen, and if I can prevent its waking when I am grown up I shall always be good, but a very little thing will waken it; it wants so much to be wakened, and if it is once wakened it will run all through me, and soon I shall be like mamma.”