Muriel realised the impossibility of frustrating this plan, though the last thing in the world that she desired was to be alone with him.  But the distance to the house was not great.  As the children scampered away to the waiting motor-car she moved briskly to leave the field.

Nick walked beside her with his free, elastic swagger.  In a few moments he reached out and took her hockey-stick from her.

“Jove!” he said.  “It did me good to see you shoot that goal.”

“I had no idea you were watching,” she returned stiffly.

He grinned.  “No, I saw that.  Fun, wasn’t it?  Like to know what I said to myself?”

She made no answer, and his grin became a laugh.  “I’m sure you would, so I’ll tell you.  I said, ‘Prayer Number One is granted,’ and I ticked it off the list, and duly acknowledged the same.”

Muriel was plainly mystified.  He was in the mood that most baffled her.  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said at last.

Nick swung the hockey-stick idly.  His yellow face, for all its wrinkles, looked peculiarly complacent.

“Let me explain,” he said coolly; “I wanted to see you young again, and—­my want has been satisfied, that’s all.”

Muriel looked sharply away from him, the vivid colour rushing all over her face.  She remembered—­and the memory seemed to stab her—­a day long, long ago when she had lain in this man’s arms in the extremity of helpless suffering, and had heard him praying above her head, brokenly, passionately, for something far different—­something from which she had come to shrink with a nameless, overmastering dread.

She quickened her pace in the silence that followed.  The rain was coming down sharply.  Reaching the door that led into the doctor’s walled garden, she stretched out her hand with impetuous haste to push it open.

Instantly, with disconcerting suddenness, Nick dropped the hockey-stick and swooped upon it like a bird of prey.

“Who gave you that?” he demanded.

He had spied a hoop of diamonds upon her third finger.  She could not see his eyes under the flickering lids, but he held her wrist forcibly, and it seemed to her that there was a note of savagery in his voice.

Her heart beat fast for a few seconds, so fast that she could not find her voice.  Then, almost under her breath, “Blake gave it to me,” she said.  “Blake Grange.”

“Yes?” said Nick.  “Yes?”

Suddenly he looked straight at her, and his eyes were alight, fierce, glowing.  But she felt a curious sense of scared relief, as if he were behind bars,—­an eagle caged, of which she need have no fear.

“We are engaged to be married,” she said quietly.

There fell a momentary silence, and a voice cried out in her soul that she had stabbed him through the bars.

Then in a second Nick dropped her hands and stooped to pick up the hockey-stick.  His face as he stood up again flashed back to its old, baffling gaiety.