She was on her feet as he asked the question, on her face such a look of eagerness as it had not worn for many weary months.

“Oh, please—­if you would!” she said, her words falling fast and breathless.  “It has been—­such a grief to me—­that I had nothing of his to—­to treasure.”

He turned at once to the door.  The desolation that those words of hers revealed to him went straight to his man’s heart.  Poor little girl!  Had the parting been so infernally hard as even now to bring that look to her eyes?  Was her father’s memory the only interest she had left in her sad young life?  And all the evening, save for that first brief moment of their meeting, he had been thinking her cold, impassive, even cynical.

With a deep pity in his soul he departed on his errand.

Returning with the soft tread which was his peculiarity, he surprised her with her face in her hands in an attitude of such abandonment that he drew back hesitating.  But, suddenly aware of him, she sprang up swiftly, with no sign of tears upon her face.

“Oh, come in, come in!” she said impatiently.  “Why do you stand there?”

She ran forward to meet him with hands hungrily outstretched, and he put into them those trifles which were to her so infinitely precious—­a cigarette-case, a silver match-box, a pen-knife, a little old prayer-book very worn at the edges, with all the gilt faded from its leaves.  She gathered them to her breast closely, passionately.  All but the prayer-book had been her gifts to the father she had worshipped.  With a wrung heart she called to mind the occasion upon which each had been offered, his smile of kindly appreciation, the old-world courtliness of his thanks.  With loving hands she laid them down one by one, lingering over each, seeing them through a blur of tears.  She was no longer conscious of Grange, as reverently, even diffidently, she opened last of all the little shabby prayer-book that her father had been wont to take with him on all his marches.  She knew that he had cherished it as her mother’s gift.

It opened upon a scrap of white heather which marked the Service for the Burial of the Dead.  Her tears fell upon the faded sprig, and she brushed her hand swiftly across her eyes, looking more closely as certain words underlined caught her attention.  Other words had been written by her father’s hand very minutely in the margin.

The passage underlined was ... “not to be sorry as men without hope, for them that sleep ...” and in a moment she guessed that her father had made that mark on the day of her mother’s death.  It was like a message to her, the echo of a cry.

The words in the margin were so small that she had to carry them to the light to read them.  And then they flashed out at her as if sprung suddenly to light on the white paper.  There, in the beloved handwriting, sure and indelible, she read it, and across the desert of her heart, voiceless but insistent, there swept the hunger-cry of a man’s soul:  OMNIA VINCIT AMOR.