When I think of him flinging off the years and whistling childhood back, not to himself only, but to all who heard, distributing it among them gaily, imperiously calling on them to dance, dance, for they are boys and girls again until they stop--when to recall him in those wild moods is to myself to grasp for a moment at the dear dead days that were so much the best, I cannot wonder that Grizel loved him.

I am his slave myself; I see that all that was wrong with Tommy was that he could not always be a boy.
"Hide there again, Grizel," he cried to her, little Tommy cried to her, Stroke the Jacobite, her captain, cried to the Lady Griselda; and he disappeared, and presently marched down the path with an imaginary Elspeth by his side.

"I love you both, Elspeth," he was going to say, "and my love for the one does not make me love the other less"; but he glanced at Grizel, and she was leaning forward to catch his words as if this were no play, but life or death, and he knew what she longed to hear him say, and he said it: "I love you very much, Elspeth, but however much I love you, it would be idle to pretend that I don't love Grizel more." A stifled cry of joy came from a clump of whin hard by, and they were man and woman again.
"Did you not know it, Grizel ?" "No, no; you never told me." "I never dreamed it was necessary to tell you." "Oh, if you knew how I have longed that it might be so, yes, and sometimes hated Elspeth because I feared it could not be! I have tried so hard to be content with second place.

I have thought it all out, and said to myself it was natural that Elspeth should be first." "My tragic love," he said, "I can see you arguing in that way, but I don't see you convincing yourself.

My passionate Grizel is not the girl to accept second place from anyone.