“What?  Why, yesterday, to be sure.  Spent the night in town.  No, I know I didn’t.  Never meant to.  Wanted to steal a march on you all.  Why not?  I say, is that—­Muriel?”

For the first time he seemed to perceive her, and instantly with a dexterous movement he had disengaged himself from Olga’s clinging arms and was briskly approaching her.  Two of the doctor’s boys sprang to greet him, but he waved them airily aside.

“All right, you chaps, in a minute!  Where’s Dr. Jim?  Go and tell him I’m here.”

And then in a couple of seconds more they were face to face.

Muriel stared at him speechlessly.  She felt cold from head to foot.  She had known that he was coming.  She had been steeling herself for weeks to meet him in an armour of conventional reserve.  But all her efforts had come to this.  Swift, swift as the wind over wheat, his coming swept across her new-born confidence.  It wavered and bent its head.

“Does your Excellency deign to remember the least and humblest of her servants?” queried Nick, with a deep salaam.

The laugh in his tone brought her sharply back to the demand of circumstance.  Before the watching crowd of children, she forced her white lips to smile in answer, and in a moment she had recovered her self-possession.  She remembered with a quick sense of relief that this man’s power over her belonged to the past alone—­to the tale that was told.

The hand she held out to him was almost steady.  “Yes, I remember you, Nick,” she said, with chilly courtesy.  “I am sorry you have been ill.  Are you better?”

He made a queer grimace at her words, and for the second that her hand lay in his, she knew that he looked at her closely, piercingly.

“Thanks—­awfully,” he said.  “As you may have noticed, there is a little less of me than there used to be.  I hope you think it’s an improvement.”

She felt as if he had flung back her conventional sympathy in her face, and she stiffened instinctively.  “I am sorry to see it,” she returned icily.

Nick laughed enigmatically.  “I thought you would be.  Well, Olga, my child, what do you mean by growing up like this in my absence?  You used to be just the right size for a kid, and now you are taller than I am.”

“I’m not, Nick,” the child declared with warmth.  “And I never will be, there!”

She slid her arm again round his neck.  Her eyes were full of tears.

Nick turned swiftly and bestowed a kiss upon the face which, though the face of a child, was so remarkably like his own.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friends?” he said.

“There’s no need,” said Olga, hugging him closer.  “They all know Captain Ratcliffe of Wara.  Why haven’t you got the V.C., Nick, like Captain Grange?”

“Didn’t qualify for it,” returned Nick.  “You see, I only distinguished myself by running away.  Hullo!  It’s raining.  Just run and tell the chauffeur to drive round to the house.  You can go with him.  And take your friends too.  It’ll carry you all.  I’m going the garden way with Muriel.”