“If it does happen, Muriel,” he said, using her Christian name quite unconsciously, “we shall have to stand by her, you and I. You won’t leave her, will you?  You would be of more use to her than I. Oh, it’s—­it’s damnable to see a woman in trouble and not be able to comfort her.”

He brought his ungloved hand down upon the gate-post with a violence that drew blood; then, seeing her face of amazement, thrust it hastily behind him.

“I’m a fool,” he said, with his shy, semi-apologetic smile.  “Don’t mind me, Miss Roscoe.  You know, I—­I’m awfully fond of Daisy, always was.  My people were her people, and when they died we were the only two left, as it were.  Of course she was married by that time, and there are some other relations somewhere.  But we’ve always hung together, she and I. You can understand it, can’t you?”

Muriel fancied she could, but his vehemence startled her none the less.  She had not deemed him capable of such intensity.

“I suppose you feel almost as if she were your sister,” she remarked, groping half-unconsciously for an explanation.

Grange was holding the gate open for her.  He did not instantly reply.

Then, “I don’t exactly know what that feels like,” he said, with an odd shame-facedness.  “But in so far as that we have been playfellows and chums all our lives, I suppose you might describe it in that way.”

And Muriel, though she wondered a little at the laborious honesty of his reply, was satisfied that she understood.

She was drifting into a very pleasant friendship with Blake Grange.  He seemed to rely upon her in an indefinable fashion that made their intercourse of necessity one of intimacy.  Moreover, Daisy’s habits were still more or less those of an invalid, and this fact helped very materially to throw them together.

To Muriel, emerging slowly from the long winter of her sorrow, the growing friendship with this man whom she both liked and admired was as a shaft of sunshine breaking across a grey landscape.  Insensibly it was doing her good.  The deep shadow of a horror that once had overwhelmed her was lifting gradually away from her life.  In her happier moments it almost seemed that she was beginning to forget.

Grange’s suggestion that they should ride together awoke in her a keener sense of pleasure than she had known since the tragedy of Wara had darkened her young life, and for the rest of the day she looked forward eagerly to the resumption of this her favourite exercise.

Daisy was delighted with the idea, and when on the following morning Grange ransacked the town for suitable mounts and returned triumphant, she declared gaily that she should take no further trouble for her guest’s entertainment.  The responsibility from that day forth rested with Muriel.

Muriel was by no means loth to assume it.  They got on excellently together, and their almost daily rides became a source of keen pleasure to her.  Winter was fast merging into spring, and the magic of the coming season was working in her blood.  There were times when a sense of spontaneous happiness would come over her, she knew not wherefore.  Jim Ratcliffe no longer looked at her with stern-browed disapproval.