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.

She and Grange both became regular members of Olga's hockey team. They
shared most of their pursuits. Among other things she was learning the
accompaniments of his songs. Grange had a well-cultivated tenor voice,
to which Daisy the restless would listen for any length of time.

Altogether they were a ve