“I will remember your wish, Miss Roscoe,” he said.  “I am sorry I mentioned a painful subject to you, though I am glad for you to know the truth.  You are not vexed with me, I hope?”

Her eyes shone with sincere friendliness.  “I am not vexed,” she answered.  “Only—­let me forget—­that’s all.”

And in those few words she voiced the desire of her soul.  It was her one longing, her one prayer—­to forget.  And it was the one thing of all others denied to her.

In the silence that followed, she was conscious of his warm and kindly sympathy, and she was grateful for it, though something restrained her from telling him so.

Daisy, coming lightly in upon them, put an end to their tete-a-tete.  She entered softly, her face alight and tender, and laid her two hands upon Grange’s great shoulders as he sat before the fire.

“Come upstairs, Blake,” she whispered, “and see my baby boy.  He’s sleeping so sweetly.  I want you to see him first while he’s good.”

He raised his face to her smiling, his hands on hers.  “I am sure to admire anything that belongs to you, Daisy,” he said.

“You’re a dear old pal,” responded Daisy lightly.  “Come along.”

When they were gone Muriel spied Will Musgrave’s letter lying on the ground by Grange’s chair as it had evidently fallen from Daisy’s dress.  She went over and picked it up.  It was still unopened.

With an odd little frown she set it up prominently upon the mantelpiece.

“Does Love conquer after all?” she murmured to herself, and there was a faint twist of cynicism about her lips as she asked the question.  There seemed to be so many forms of Love.

CHAPTER XIX

A HERO WORSHIPPER

“Well played!  Oh, well played!  Miss Roscoe, you’re a brick.”

The merry voice of the doctor’s little daughter Olga, aged fourteen, shrilled across the hockey-ground, keen with enthusiasm.  She was speeding across the field like a hare to congratulate her latest recruit.

“I’m so pleased!” she cried, bursting through the miscellaneous crowd of boys and girls that surrounded Muriel.  “I wanted you to shoot that goal.”

She herself had been acting as goal-keeper at her own end of the field, a position of limited opportunities which she had firmly refused to assign to the new-comer.  A child of unusual character was Olga Ratcliffe, impulsive but shrewd, with quick, pale eyes which never seemed to take more than a brief glance at anything, yet which very little ever escaped.  At first sight Muriel had experienced a certain feeling of aversion to her, so marked was the likeness this child bore to the man whom she desired so passionately to shut out of her very memory.  But a nearer intimacy had weakened her antipathy till very soon it had altogether disappeared.  Olga had a swift and fascinating fashion of endearing