If only Miss Ailie, or others like her, could have slipped noiselessly into Double Dykes at night, they would have found Grizel's pillow wet. But she would have heard them long before they reached the door, and jumped to the floor in terror, thinking it was her father's step at last. For, unknown to anyone, his coming, which the town so anxiously desired, was her one dread. She had told Tommy what she should say to him if he came, and Tommy had been awed and delighted, they were such scathing things; probably, had the necessity arisen, she would have found courage to say them, but they were made up in the daytime, and at night they brought less comfort. Then she listened fearfully and longed for the morning, wild ideas coursing through her head of flying before he could seize her; but when morning came it brought other thoughts, as of the strange remarks she had heard about her mamma and herself during the past few days. To brood over these was the most unhealthy occupation she could find, but it was her only birthright. Many of the remarks came unguardedly from lips that had no desire to pain her, others fell in a rage because she would not tell what were the names in her letter to God. The words that troubled her most, perhaps, were the doctor's, "She is a brave lass, but it must be in her blood." They were not intended for her ears, but she heard. "What did he mean?" she asked Miss Ailie, Mrs. Dishart, and others who came to see her, and they replied awkwardly, that it had only been a doctor's remark, of no importance to people who were well. "Then why are you crying?" she demanded, looking them full in the face with eyes there was no deceiving.
"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.