It was the first time she had admitted it, and his head wagged well content, as if saying for him, “I knew you would understand me some day.”  But next moment the haunting shadow that so often overtook him in the act of soaring fell cold upon his mind, and “I maun take Elspeth!” he announced, as if Elspeth had him by the leg.

“You sha’n’t!” said Grizel’s face.

“She winna let go,” said Tommy’s.

Grizel quivered from top to toe.  “I hate Elspeth!” she cried, with curious passion, and the more moral Tommy was ashamed of her.

“You dinna ken how fond o’ her I am,” he said.

“Yes, I do.”

“Then you shouldna want me to leave her and go wi’ you.”

“That is why I want it,” Grizel blurted out, and now we are all ashamed of her.  But fortunately Tommy did not see how much she had admitted in that hasty cry, and as neither would give way to the other they parted stiffly, his last words being “Mind, it wouldna be respectable to go by yoursel’,” and hers “I don’t care, I’m going.”  Nevertheless it was she who slept easily that night, and he who tossed about almost until cockcrow.  She had only one ugly dream, of herself wandering from door to door in a strange town, asking for lodgings, but the woman who answered her weary knocks—­there were many doors but it was invariably the same woman—­always asked, suspiciously, “Is Tommy with you?” and Grizel shook her head, and then the woman drove her away, perceiving that she was not respectable.  This woke her, and she feared the dream would come true, but she clenched her fists in the darkness, saying, “I can’t help it, I am going, and I won’t have Elspeth,” and after that she slept in peace.  In the meantime Tommy the imaginative—­but that night he was not Tommy, rather was he Grizel, for he saw her as we can only see ourselves.  Now she—­or he, if you will—­had been caught by her father and brought back, and she turned into a painted thing like her mother.  She brandished a brandy bottle and a stream of foul words ran lightly from her mouth and suddenly stopped, because she was wailing “I wanted so to be good, it is sweet to be good!” Now a man with a beard was whipping her, and Tommy felt each lash on his own body, so that he had to strike out, and he started up in bed, and the horrible thing was that he had never been asleep.  Thus it went on until early morning, when his eyes were red and his body was damp with sweat.

But now again he was Tommy, and at first even to think of leaving Elspeth was absurd.  Yet it would be pleasant to leave Aaron, who disliked him so much.  To disappear without a word would be a fine revenge, for the people would say that Aaron must have ill-treated him, and while they searched the pools of the burn for his body, Aaron would be looking on trembling, perhaps with a policeman’s hand on his shoulder.  Tommy saw the commotion as vividly as if the searchers were already out and he in a tree looking down at them; but in a second he also heard Elspeth skirling, and down he flung himself from the tree, crying, “I’m here, Elspeth, dinna greet; oh, what a brute I’ve been!” No, he could not leave Elspeth, how wicked of Grizel to expect it of him; she was a bad one, Grizel.